LET'S TALK ABOUT...BODY IMAGE

Looking sleek, stylish and fast is an integral part of cycling, but brings with it a pressure to conform. Chris Marshall-Bell breaks the taboo on the sport's body-image troubles

-  Chris Marshall-Bell

When Jacob Ward took up cycling during the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020, inspired by watching the Tour de France, he was instantly hooked. "I was so impressed by their feats of endurance that I wanted to be like them," he remembers. But there was one hitch: as a former rugby player and keen bodybuilder since his teenage years, Ward was bulkier than the average road cyclist. "My physique was abnormal for a cyclist and I had quite a lot of pushback, negative comments, people assuming I wasn't good enough for cycling because of how I looked." 

A social media influencer with over half a million followers across Instagram and TikTok, 23-year-old Ward was initially hesitant to post cycling content. And when he did, some of the comments were unkind. "Look at him, he thinks he's a cyclist, but he's clearly not," he cites one such example. "Just because I was not an ectomorph [someone who is naturally light and thin] and didn't look like a traditional cyclist, it didn't mean I couldn't be involved," he adds.

If someone with a powerful, sculpted physique like Ward can find himself subject to judgemental comments, it barely needs spelling out that cycling holds aloft abnormal, arguably unhealthy ideals of body type and appearance. Too many of us feel under pressure to look, dress and behave a certain way. It's something we need to talk about more because it affects most of us to some degree, at some stage in our cycling lives - we're made to feel insecure, or at least more concerned than we'd like, about how we look on our bikes.

Weighty issue