Cycling has a long, complicated relationship with weight. In a sport where every watt matters, and climbing is often king, power-to-weight ratio is an inescapable metric. In the fight against gravity, every extra kilogram costs precious watts. Just like the equipment used, riders strive to optimise their bodies for the demands of the terrain. Over the decades, that obsession has driven many athletes, men and women alike, into disordered eating, and the sport still struggles to draw the line between what’s healthy and what yields the best performance.
Fortunately, the culture is evolving. Today’s top riders fuel smarter, train more holistically, and place greater value on mental and physical well-being. But elite sport is rarely healthy, and body scrutiny is hard to escape. And when it comes to who gets scrutinised most, the burden is still far from equal, as this past week in France made painfully clear.
Pauline Ferrand-Prévot is one of the greatest athletes the sport of cycling has ever seen. Still just 33 years old, the Française holds 12 UCI Elite World Championship titles (15 if you include team events) across road, cyclocross, gravel and mountain bike disciplines. She’s also the reigning Olympic cross-country mountain bike champion. And as of yesterday, the winner of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.
Yet much of this past week’s discourse wasn’t about her performance, but rather, her appearance.
After her spring campaign, in which she notably won Paris-Roubaix, Ferrand-Prévot largely disappeared from the races, pouring herself into her Tour de France preparation.
This race carried a lot of significance for her. As a young child growing up in France, Ferrand-Prévot had wished she were a boy so she could race the Tour de France. For most of her life, the race didn’t exist for women. It wasn’t until 2022, three years after she quit road racing, that a revived women’s Tour de France emerged. After winning nearly everything there was to win in the dirt, Ferrand-Prévot returned to the pavement with one clear goal: to win the Tour de France Femmes within 2-3 years. The 2025 edition was supposed to be merely a “test run” yet she trained as if it were her only shot.
Like her male teammates Jonas Vingegaard, Sepp Kuss and the like, Ferrand-Prévot used every resource the Visma - Lease a Bike team made available to her. Altitude camps, performance labs, precise nutrition and guidance from sports scientists, coaches and nutritionists. She even bought a home in Andorra for easier access to big climbs.
She and her team left no stone unturned to tune her body for the Tour’s brutal mountain stages and the infamous Col de la Madeleine specifically. And yes, that meant losing weight. Four kilograms to be exact.
“For this race I knew I had to climb for one-and-a-half hours over the Col de la Madeleine and I tried to make the most of it,” she told the press. “You need to adapt to the terrain you have.” She added that she’d carried more weight in spring because she needed “power on the flats.”
When she remerged in the peloton on July 26 for the opening stage of the 2025 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, she looked leaner, and yes, skinnier, than ever. Fans, competitors and media were quick to take note. In turn, Ferrand-Prévot addressed the questions and concerns with frankness.
“It’s my job to be the best as possible,” Ferrand-Prévot said. “We know this is an endurance sport, and to climb you need to have a [high] watts per kilogram. I made the choice. I worked hard for it.”
She was also quick to note that this peak-performance physique was temporary.
“I don’t want to stay like this,” she said. “But we also had a good plan with the team’s nutritionist and everything is in control. I didn’t do anything extreme and I still had power left after nine days of racing.”
Whether her approach was commendable or not is up for debate. But it certainly wasn’t anything unusual. Vingegaard undergoes similar altitude camps, closely managed lean-outs, and rigorous performance targeting. Tadej Pogačar, too, has spoken about managing weight through training and the off-season. Yet during their three weeks of racing in July, neither man faced even half the public scrutiny Ferrand-Prévot received this week.
Her weight loss was splashed across newspaper pages, debated on TV panels, criticised on social media. “She’s too skinny.” “This isn’t healthy.” “A bad example for young girls.” Some even accused her of promoting disordered eating, despite the fact that her preparation was medically supervised. All this body commentary cast a shadow over a golden performance.
Sure, male cyclists’ bodies are scrutinised too, but less often and differently. Society tends to treat male performance optimisation as purely athletic. A female athlete’s weight, by contrast, becomes a matter of public concern, moral judgment, even policing.
So what did Ferrand-Prévot do that was so different from any other elite athlete tuning their body for peak performance? She did it as a woman. That gendered lens, the comments, the coded concern, the casual critique, tells us more about us than it does about her. It's a glaring double standard.
Yes, we should always scrutinise our sport and ensure athlete well-being comes first. We must emphasise also that the questionable measures taken at the top level are highly event- and rider-specific and done in a controlled environment; it's not something for amateurs to emulate. And that’s precisely why Ferrand‑Prévot’s transparency should be commended, not condemned. There are real concerns about athlete well-being in endurance sport, and undoubtedly, cycling has long had a weight obsession, but that weight is not hers alone to carry.
This week, the world should be talking about Ferrand‑Prévot’s tactical brilliance on the Col de la Madeleine, her searing solo into Châtel, and her historic victory. Let’s not diminish it by reducing her to a body.
If we’re going to question Ferrand‑Prévot, we must question every man in the mountains the same way. Until then, let her be legendary.
