The unspoken cost of cycling’s weight obsession - An anonymous letter from the women’s peloton

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

Cycling is one of the oldest sports in the world. Like any sport, it has evolved – nutrition, equipment, training methods, and technology have all advanced. Yet, one principle seems stuck in the past: the belief that to succeed, you must be the smallest, lightest version of yourself.

Coming into cycling from a diverse sporting background, I’ve never felt so insecure, so dark, or so sad about my body. The culture is uniquely toxic. Teammates, peers, and even people in the industry reinforce the idea that weight is everything. 

They joke about drinking water instead of food, missing meals and doing extra training without putting it into training apps. 

It’s almost become a place for eating disorders to be acknowledged as normal or just the life of a cyclist. For years, I believed it. I starved myself, I got lighter, and at first, it “worked”. I had results. But then my health began to collapse.

I stopped menstruating for six years. My hair fell out. My bone density plummeted. I woke up exhausted every day, with heart palpitations. My mood deteriorated so badly that my partner once admitted he feared I’d never recover. 

The truth is: starving your body also starves your brain. Studies show that athletes with chronic energy deficiency lose rational thinking and even intellectual capacity. I felt that happening to me.

This isn’t just an individual struggle, it’s systemic. Within teams, athletes are pressured to “return” to a previous racing weight. Riders appear to eat well during races, but many starve themselves in private. Some weigh themselves morning and night, chasing numbers that fluctuate naturally. This culture doesn’t just damage performance – it damages lives. 

Teams also need to be held accountable to educate their riders of good nutrition habits but also the dangers around their health of not eating enough. 

When I first started cycling, I had no knowledge, only that someone told me I needed to lose my puppy fat. Which I did, I got myself to below 7% body fat as a female. My team at the time told me that if I could get myself to 8% body fat, I would be fine. When I think about that now, it makes me sick. That a barely 20-year-old woman thought she could sustain such a low body fat percentage and be healthy.

Other sports, like climbing, have recognised the danger and now require bone density and hormone checks for competition. Relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S) in women is continuing to rise within our sport, but no one seems to care. I have had riders laugh and joke about their bones being paper thin, it’s frightening. Sport climbing is leading the way in reducing the number of RED-S cases and cycling needs to do the same. 

Because when our careers end - and they will, because every rider is replaceable - we’re left with our bodies. And nobody wants to be 40 years old in a wheelchair, with the results of 2022 long forgotten. I believe that it could be different, we can change it before it’s broken, because no race win is worth the cost of a broken life

Tomorrow, the conversation continues with a rare and honest account from within the men’s peloton, shedding light on a reality that is too often hidden.