Inside the men’s peloton - 'A burger wasn’t just food, it was failure'

This letter, shared anonymously, comes from a male professional rider.

I grew up with cycling in my blood. My family watched the Tour de France together every summer, and when I was seven years old, I stood by the roadside and watched the peloton fly past. From that moment on, I knew this was what I wanted to do with my life: become a professional cyclist.

As I progressed in the sport, I quickly learned that in men’s cycling you had to be as light as possible. Many of the riders around me were extremely thin, and I accepted early on that this was part of the job. Once I joined the WorldTour peloton, that mindset became even more ingrained. I started tracking and weighing all my food, cutting out anything that wasn’t considered “pure fuel.” A burger, for example, wasn’t just food, it was failure, and not something I could eat unless there was a good reason or it was the off-season.

It wasn’t only about nutrition. At altitude camps and within teams, it almost felt like a competition: who could lose the most weight. Teammates would joke about body fat, staff would reinforce the pressure, and the culture normalised disordered eating as discipline. 

What began as something staff and nutritionists called dedication eventually turned into obsession. I couldn’t live without my scale, and going out for dinner felt impossible because it would “ruin” all my progress.

I reached a point of being under-fuelled for so long that I couldn’t train properly. My body felt broken. I couldn’t train or recover, I was constantly sick or injured, and mentally I was crumbling. In men’s cycling, we don’t have the same visible “red flags” that women do, like the loss of menstruation, so it often gets ignored or dismissed. 

For men, low testosterone, depression, and a kind of constant fragility become the quiet reality. But in the peloton, that’s just seen as weakness, not a medical issue.

Eventually, I had to face the fact that I couldn’t continue like this. Over several years, I worked, often in secret, to rebuild my relationship with food and with my body. It wasn’t easy. Gaining weight in an environment that celebrates thinness is incredibly difficult, and I had to learn to tune out the comments and the doubts. 

But the result was that, for the first time in my career, I completed a season without missing races due to illness, injury, or burnout. Fueling properly hasn’t made me weaker, it has made me reliable, resilient, and happier, both on and off the bike.

I believe RED-S and disordered eating in men’s cycling need to be spoken about more openly. Right now, it is often swept under the rug, as though it’s just “part of the sport.” But we’re losing talented riders, shortening careers, and damaging mental health because of a culture that glorifies under-fuelling. 

If we want cycling to be sustainable for the next generation, we have to challenge that. I hope that by speaking about it, more male cyclists will feel able to acknowledge these struggles not as weakness, but as part of building a stronger sport.