Weight debate in cycling: When does it become dangerous for the body?

The last women's Tour de France reignited a debate that some thought had been overcome in cycling. Thanks to her strong performances on the climbs, Frenchwoman Pauline Ferrand-Prévot won the Tour convincingly. She weighed visibly and significantly less than when she won the spring Clásique Paris–Roubaix in April. An Olympic mountain bike champion a year ago, Ferrand-Prévot returned to road cycling to win the Tour.

Did she pursue this goal with overly drastic measures? This is currently a hotly debated topic in the cycling world. Does Ferrand-Prévot's weight loss hark back to an era in cycling when the motto "the thinner, the better" applied? And how is the weight loss affecting her health?

Marlen Reusser was aiming for the overall victory in this year's Tour de France. However , after suffering from a gastrointestinal infection and food poisoning within a few days, she had to withdraw on the first day. Ferrand-Prévot's condition and her dominant victory on the queen stage were on her and other riders' minds, and there was excitement in the WhatsApp chats. In a video call from her home in Andorra, Reusser says: "What's been bothering me is that riders like Pauline set a standard that, for a while, I thought had been overcome."

A lot of educational work has been done in cycling in recent years. Nutritionists on the teams support the riders in giving their bodies exactly what they need. Things were different when Reusser started cycling a few years ago. Now, when riders like Ferrand-Prévot or Sarah Gigante dominate the climbs, Reusser asks herself: "Can I still challenge for the win? Or am I only in it if I go along with them and lose that much weight?"

Weight plays a crucial role in mountain performance. The watt-per-kilogram value reflects power in relation to body weight. But the formula isn't so simple that all professional cyclists fly up the mountain after losing weight. Joëlle Flück is a sports and nutrition scientist and has a consulting mandate with Swiss Cycling. She says that in many cases, weight loss carries more risk than benefit.

Whether and how much weight someone can lose depends on numerous factors, starting with genetic predisposition, current body composition, and general health. Flück says: "Inducing a calorie deficit to ensure weight loss can, among other things, disrupt hormonal balance, reduce bone density and metabolism, and limit recovery and performance." In the long term, reduced bone density can even lead to stress fractures while cycling.

This is what endurance athletes fear most about low weight: RED (relative energy deficit) syndrome (RED-S). If you don't give your body what it needs, you quickly create an imbalance. This is referred to as low energy availability. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) estimates that, depending on the sport, between 15 and 80 percent of all elite athletes are affected. Sometimes without knowing it. Young endurance athletes have long been told that it's normal for their periods to stop—but this is their body's way of signaling that something is wrong.

Prolonged malnutrition causes lasting damage to the body. Marlen Reusser reports on many riders in the peloton who were once "ultra-thin and ultra-fit" but now never reach their previous level of performance again. Some recover and talk about the hell of the situation when nothing works anymore – Ferrand-Prévot knows this too. She once slipped into a deep crisis during her mountain bike career.

Many professionals want even more education so that young female riders understand what they are risking for a short-term goal. Swiss Cycling, for example, is trying to educate as many elite athletes as possible about RED-S, cycle management, and nutrition during training through input on sports medicine and sports nutrition. Sports medicine conducts annual examinations, with various parameters that can provide clues to RED-S problems. Flück is also available as a contact person for sports nutrition if needed.

Demi Vollering, the winner of the 2023 Tour de France, shared her thoughts on the weight debate in detail on Instagram . She emphasized that she always prioritizes health throughout her career. "I'm not the lightest-built rider in the field. And I don't want to force my body into something it isn't." It's not about comparisons, she said, but about taking responsibility. Encouraging young female riders to listen to their bodies, ask questions, and confront them. Numerous other professionals have shared their experiences with eating disorders since the Tour de France.

When it comes to major victories, even experienced athletes like Reusser, at 33, find it difficult to fend off certain thoughts. "Pauline puts question marks in our heads. Of course, I'll eat my next ice cream with a different feeling." She herself is more prone to illness when she pushes her body too far to its limits. She, now one of the best climbers in the world, also considered "taking another step" in terms of weight. But she decided against it so as not to put even more pressure on her body.

Tour de France winner Ferrand-Prévot received numerous negative comments after sharing her difficult journey to achieving her goal weight on social media. She said this at the press conference after the Tour de France when her weight was discussed. She said her approach was probably not entirely healthy. "But it wasn't anything extreme. And I don't want to stay like this." Parents should explain to their children, with whom they watched the Tour de France, how she achieved her victory.

Whether Ferrand-Prévot's actions harmed her health or not cannot be assessed from the outside without knowing her health parameters. Genetics, body constitution, hormonal status, and the proportion of her body weight that is muscle or fat mass all play a role. Some symptoms of malnutrition can appear after just a few days; others, such as reduced bone density, are only noticeable after months.

Joëlle Flück supports athletes who have a healthy body weight and a healthy body fat percentage, yet still exhibit menstrual irregularities or signs of RED-S. Body weight alone isn't enough to assess health status. And: "Athletes can achieve incredible levels of performance for a relatively long time, even though they've been in a massively compromised range for a long time. It's like a kind of negative mental strength – you push yourself further and further toward peak performance because success is the most important thing at the moment."

At what price, we will only know later.

An article from the « NZZ am Sonntag »