Power-to-Weight: Cycling and Body Image in a World Where Skinny Rules

Cycling, as far as I know, is the only community in which men appear to obsess more over their weight than women do. The first time I heard a male member of the spandex set complaining how big his butt was this season, I almost laughed, thinking he had to be joking. Thank goodness I didn’t, since he was totally, unhappily, serious.

There are all kinds of body types in men’s professional cycling, but it’s true that most of them are on the skinny side. There’s tall and twiggy (your all-arounders and classics riders), and short and twiggy (your climbers and stage racers, mostly). Even the sprinters, who look stocky compared to the rest of the riders, are shockingly thin in reality. I recently met Mario Cipollini, a decorated sprinter who always looked enormous and lion-like on video compared to his teammates; in person he is tall (six feet and three inches) but incredibly narrow-shouldered and lanky; in his prime, he was only 167 pounds!

Essentially, long hours of training burn so many calories that body fat drops to under maybe 5 percent. Extra weight, at any event, only holds a cyclist back when the road goes uphill. The magic mantra is the power-to-weight ratio: the more power you can produce, and the less you weigh, the faster you will climb. Of course this is only true to a certain extent: lose too much body mass, and you will rapidly lose power too, resulting in a lower power-to-weight  ratio. However, I’m not really here to discuss the scientific physiological arguments for or against weight control in endurance sports: I’m interested in the psychological aspects.

Unexpected as this may seem, my impression is that there is actually greater variety in body types among pro women racers. Perhaps this is because the formula relating power to weight is actually subtly different for women than it is for men. There are lots of thin girls, of course (both tall and petite), but there are also girls with lots of muscle and girls with curves (though, truthfully, not too many: flat-chestedness appear to be almost a prerequisite for lining up at a national-level race).

At any rate, I hear much less commentary from women bike racers about their shape and size than I do from men. All the same, I’m not sure this is because women are less concerned about weight. Perhaps we’re just more private about our anxieties.