LET'S TALK ABOUT EATING DISORDERS

Athletic ambition can tip into a toxic relationship with food. Chris Marshall-Bell investigates cycling's dark underbelly

- Chris Marshall-Bell

Jan Tratnik had been cycling for only three years when Quick-Step signed him to his first World Tour contract in 2011. He was young, naive, inexperienced and keen to please those around him. "We did some tests [in training] and when we saw my watts per kilo, someone suggested that if I lost another two kilograms I could be really, really good on the climbs," he says.

"So I listened to them." What Tratnik, then 20, didn't know was that, at 65kg, he had no spare kilos to lose. "The truth was, I didn't have much fat so it was really hard to lose this weight," he recalls. "That's how it started, because! didn't know what to do." The 'it' he refers to was an eating disorder. "I reduced my eating to almost nothing to lose those extra two kilos, but it was really hard because I was losing muscle," the Slovenian, now 34, continues. "I was hungry all the time - I was starving." He was in the early stages of anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder and serious mental health condition characterised by a fixation on keeping weight as low as possible. "I was eating maybe one or two meals per day, but only small amounts." As commonly occurs in anorexia, Tratnik also developed bulimia - binge eating followed by purging, forcing himself to be sick. "I couldn't handle being starving, so I cracked and ate too much," he says.

"24% OF FEMALE AND 9% OF MALE RIDERS WERE AT RISK"