Power versus weight: Are the Tour de France’s top climbers getting heavier?

Jonas Vingegaard and Matteo Jorgenson are perhaps both expected to finish in the top five of this year’s Tour de France, lofty heights reserved for the sport’s climbers, but after stage two of the event last weekend, the pair joked about adopting a very different discipline.

“You’re a sprinter now,” laughed Jorgenson, after Vingegaard had almost outsprinted Tadej Pogacar and Mathieu van der Poel for stage victory in Boulogne-sur-Mer. “I like it. You’d said you were huge — so you had to back it up now.”

“You don’t grow this for nothing,” Vingegaard smiled back. The Dane is still a skinny figure but had announced before the Tour began that he had spent his off-season adding muscle mass for increased explosivity.

Two days later, on stage four to Rouen, Vingegaard resembled one of the world’s best puncheurs, as well as one of its best climbers. Following Pogacar’s attack in the closing kilometres, Vingegaard produced the best one-minute power effort of his career, matching the Slovenian’s famed acceleration.

And what’s more, looking at the current top 10 of this year’s general classification, Vingegaard is not alone in possessing power.

Even ignoring Van der Poel (who will not be a contender come the mountain stages), the general classification (GC) battle also includes Pogacar and Remco Evenepoel, who are both more muscular athletes, as well as the likes of Kevin Vauquelin (third), Jorgenson (fifth), and Florian Lipowitz (eighth).

All of the above weigh more than 68kg, while Derek Gee finished fourth in the Giro d’Italia last month while weighing 75kg.

Traditionally, elite climbers have focused on shedding weight to increase their watts-per-kilo figure — from 1990 to 2020, the average weight of a Tour rider fell from 72kg to 68kg. Grand Tour champions of the last 20 years such as Chris Froome, Bradley Wiggins, Nairo Quintana, Alberto Contador and Fabio Aru are all noted proponents of this approach.

Previously, Vingegaard may have fallen into their camp. But this year, his outlook has changed — attempting to improve his watts-per-kilo by supercharging his power with a modest increase in muscle mass.

The race hits the mountains of the Massif Central today (Monday) — the first real test of his new approach.

Already a two-time Tour champion, it is an undeniable risk for Vingegaard. Is the 28-year-old in the vanguard of a new trend in cycling — and will his reconditioning pay off?

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Mathieu Heijboer is head of performance at Vingegaard’s Visma Lease-a-Bike team and has worked extensively with the Tour contender in recent months.

“Jonas started doing this as a consequence of his nasty crash (in the Tour of the Basque Country) last year,” he explains. “When he was in intensive care, not able to ride at all, and just laid in his bed, he lost quite a bit of muscle mass that we had to regain.

“Last year, we didn’t necessarily have time for that, but this winter we were able to approach it from a longer-term perspective. This is mostly in the legs, but to cope with hard accelerations you have to be strong in your torso and your core — he needed to cope with those high peaks, those high power outputs.”

At the 2024 Tour, Vingegaard had noticed he was losing out to Pogacar at high-watts moments, identifying it as a key weakness ahead of this year’s race. By following Pogacar in Rouen, he showed the improvements he has made.

“Cycling is an endurance sport, but it’s also one where you need to distance yourself from your opponent,” says Heijboer. “The level is so high now, and in these races, the difference is made solely by explosiveness — which rider still has acceleration in their legs. In the past, maybe some riders were stronger in the aerobic part and could just ride faster. Now that difference is getting smaller and smaller.”

But knowing how to add that muscle is part of the challenge.

Riders don’t want to add muscle in the wrong places — upper-body strength is of limited usefulness to a climber — and, as the Red Bull-BORA-Hansgrohe team’s director of coaching Dan Lorang explains, will often train in very specific ways.

“Riders try to use as many of their muscle fibres as possible,” Lorang says. “It’s sometimes not about adding new fibres, because you need to feed them with more oxygen, but about recruiting all the fibres you already have to become more explosive, and to gain more resilience. But you still need to keep the endurance, so you’re not too tired to use those muscles.

“Most of that training takes place on the bike, because it makes no sense to have muscles you can’t use on it, but gym work also helps add muscle fibres. You don’t want upper-body weight that you just need to carry up the climb.”

“There was once a time when the skinny climbers were the top GC contenders,” adds Heijboer. “But I think when the likes of Primoz Roglic became a top rider, there was an explosion in what you’d call the more muscled climbers. It’s because they’re able to cope with accelerations, and are less vulnerable to crashes, weather extremes, and the like, so they’re just better all-rounders.”

While there have been increases in weight during certain eras of the Tour — Miguel Indurain won it five years running from 1991-95 at 80kg, and was nicknamed ‘Big Mig’ — that era coincided with plenty of time-trialling kilometres, where absolute watts begin to take priority over watts per kilo. But in recent editions of the Tour, time trialling kilometres have dropped to their lowest ever level.

Evenepoel, currently second on GC and the world’s best time-triallist, is another to have added muscle mass in recent seasons. He added strength a couple of years ago, with his coach Koen Pelgrim describing at the time how: “He kicks off more absolute power, but because his weight is only slightly higher, his watts per kilo has not increased… we see the explosiveness in his data.”

However, speaking in the central French town of Chinon ahead of stage nine beginning there on Sunday, Pelgrim did not feel that the notion of adding weight is a universal trend.

“I think it’s mainly individual cases,” he argued, perched on a car bonnet outside his Soudal-Quickstep team’s bus. “Obviously, in the first 10 days of the race, explosivity is a big part of the racing, but when you get to the big mountains, but for the long efforts, the power-weight ratio is still going to be crucial. It might be the case that more attention is being paid to off-bike strength training, but, especially for GC riders, not all of them are deliberately trying to add muscle mass.”

With Vingegaard’s specific training aside, it may be the case that riders’ increased size just reflects a sport that helps riders who are inherently bigger, rather than necessarily needing to bulk up.

“What has changed is the dynamics of the race,” says Red Bull’s Lorang. “You still see skinny riders, but it’s really hard for the 55kg guys to be competitive because they’re losing too much energy on the flat. If you look at the flatter stages, you need absolute power, and the larger GC contenders have that. It’s harder and harder for light riders to be successful over three weeks.”

With the average speed of the 2025 Tour — 45.6kph after stage nine — the second-fastest in history, behind only 2005, it is clear how this heft can play a role — crosswinds have already affected two stages.

But one rider who says he has not bulked up, but dropped weight, is Lidl-Trek’s Mattias Skjelmose, who sits 10th on GC entering the mountains.

“Maybe it wasn’t muscle that I lost, but my fat percentage went down,” he says. “It’s a very thin line around gaining muscle without also gaining fat — and you also never know whether the muscle is placed right.”

Skjelmose’s acceleration this year has appeared impressive as well — in April, he outkicked Pogacar and Evenepoel to win the prestigious Amstel Gold one-day race in the Netherlands.

“My coach’s approach is that explosiveness is more genetic than trainable,” he says. “Of course, you can make some improvements, but in an endurance sport, it’s still much more important, for the type of rider I am, to improve my aerobic capacity than short explosivity.”

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But even if Vingegaard’s muscle gain is not ubiquitous across the peloton, one area that has gathered increased attention is the concept of sitting at a healthy weight — not being lighter for the sake of being lighter, but finding the optimal weight for your body.

“When we talk about power-to-weight ratio, I feel we often forget about the power part,” says the EF Education-EasyPost team’s nutritionist Anna Carceller. “You don’t just want to be lean, but you want to have that power, to be the best version of yourself. It’s not just about the ratio but because of both.

“We need to remember the part of being able to have healthier muscles, a hormonal environment that means your body can adapt to the training — and then try to get as lean as possible in the approach to the race.”

A good example is Uno-X Mobility rider Jonas Abrahamsen, who put on 20kg before last year’s Tour while recording his best ever climbing performance. During this process, his peak power increased from 900 watts to 1500.

“When I started cycling, it was very popular to be skinny,” the Norwegian told The Cycling Podcast. “All my favourite riders were very skinny and I was looking up to them, hoping to be 60kg. But that was hard, because I was always hungry.

“I felt like I hadn’t progressed in my career as I had hoped to, so I needed to do something to be better. I know my muscles do better when they get more fuel, so I started to do that, and felt stronger and stronger every year.”

The biggest difference came in his general health — by beginning to fuel, his body went through what he termed a “delayed puberty”, where he got taller and needed to start shaving.

“I think a lot of riders here are at a point where it’s not very healthy to be for a long time,” says Skjelmose. “But we are in a sport where everything matters, and if you can find a small percentage by being a bit lower, then that’s where we go. I don’t think it’s healthy at all. But it’s elite sport. We go to the limit.”

“Riding six hours a day, you’re just starving (hungry) all the time — starving night and day,” four-time Tour champion Froome said during his career.

Pogacar, currently the sport’s best rider, has a different perspective.

“I’m getting older, so I’m not so obsessed anymore with going cake on cake, or just eating s**t,” the now 26-year-old told The Peter Attia Drive Podcast last year. “My diet is the same all year round. I never restrict too much or say to myself, ‘I can’t eat cake or chocolate.’ But (I eat) in measurements, and when the time is right.

“If you restrict too much, one time you will break and go completely crazy. That’s not a good relationship with food. You need to have balance.”

Cycling’s elite riders are not necessarily deliberately adding muscle, like Vingegaard. But the sport is beginning to favour larger athletes, reversing a decades-long trend — and is slowly shedding its weight stigma.

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(Top photo: Bernard Papon / AFP via Getty Images)