FITTEST HUMAN, FATTEST CHANCE?

A triathlete with the highest VO2 max ever recorded briefly flirted with a tilt at the Tour de France. Chris Marshall-Bell investigates why exceptional numbers alone are never enough

- Chris Marshall-Bell

You'd be a brave cycling fan to bet on anyone other than Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard or Remco Evenepoel to win any of the five remaining Tours de France of the 2020s. But last summer, just as Pogačar was celebrating becoming the first man in 26 years to claim the Giro-Tour double, a Norwegian triathlete declared his intention to fight for the yellow jersey in 2028.

The man in question was no newbie to cycling: Kristian Blummenfelt is an Olympic and world triathlon and Ironman champion who holds several world records and has been dubbed the 'fittest human on the planet'. But he's never competed in a standalone bike race, and come the summer of 2028, he'll be 34-and-a-half years old - only one male rider, Belgian Firmin Lambot, has won the Tour at an older age, 36 and four months, and that was in 1922.

What led Blummenfelt to be so confident - and tempted WorldTour team Jayco-Alula to offer him a contract - were his exceptional data points: his VO2 max is said to be 103ml/ kg/min, which even accounting for contested discrepancies in Norwegian testing, places him above any known readings from current or previous cyclists. His coach, Olav Aleksander Bu, told Norwegian media that switching to cycling would not be a retirement plan for Blummenfelt. Instead, there was one goal: “It must be a yellow jersey in the Tour de France; it's as simple as that.”

A few months later, Blummenfelt pressed pause on his cycling ambitions and withdrew from the Jayco-Alula deal by mutual agreement, perhaps for good, stating his intention to claim more Ironman titles and win a second triathlon gold medal at the 2028 Olympics, having been disappointed with his 12th-place showing in Paris 2024. Even so, his brief public flirtation with the Tour de France stirred a debate within cycling: to what degree can raw data indicate future glory?

The magic number?