<\/p>\n
The men\u2019s Tour de France is looming once again and, as media and fans wait impatiently for actual racing to begin, pre-race interviews, new kit releases, new bike drops and all kinds of rumours are ramping the hype up to a fever pitch.<\/p>\n
One quieter story line is Remco Evenepoel\u2019s weight loss. The Belgian told a pre-race press conference that he lost 8.8 pounds (4 kilos for you strict metric types) between his Classics campaign and Friday\u2019s Tour start.<\/p>\n
Media is fawning. \u201cLooking lean,<\/a>\u201d is the go-to comment across outlets for the last day or so as reporters compliment him on his \u201ctransformation\u201d into Grand Tour form. Sure, one reporter did question whether or not the Belgian\u2019s weight loss went too far. But even that was a performance focused question.<\/p>\n \u201cOf course,\u201d you\u2019re probably thinking. Power-to-weight, Watt\/kg, etc. All the GC favourites drop some measure of weight leading into the Grand Tours, right? \u00a0Tadej Poga\u010dar\u2019s talked about how he\u2019s carrying more muscle into this year\u2019s Tour. Jonas Vingegaard, already three weeks into Grand Tour season following his Giro victory, looks so skinny you start to wonder if Visma-Lease A Bike\u2019s black kit<\/a> isn\u2019t partially designed to hide his figure. Even Mathieu van der Poel, who has little by way of GC ambitions beyond stage hunting, looks leaner than in the spring.<\/p>\n All of this is normal. Or as normal as an already lean athlete dropping eight pounds can be. (Whether that\u2019s really normal is up for debate. There is a serious issue of disordered eating in the peloton, men\u2019s and women\u2019s, that deserves its own very serious analysis. For this story, we are focusing only on the differences in when that issue is brought up and when it is allowed to stay in the background).<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\nThe same 4 kg: Two very different responses<\/h2>\n