“You look like a proper cyclist now”: Performance, health, bodies and eating cultures in competitive cycling

Decades of social scientific research has repeatedly shown that athletes spend time socialising, training, and competing within subcultures which commonly encourage and reward an intense dedication to performance. This emphasis on performance can be, and often is, to the detriment of health. One empirical phenomenon that can flow from this social process is the enablement and normalisation of disordered eating. Drawing on data from 11 interviews with competitive cyclists, we explore this problem within road cycling in Britain. Findings shows how the cyclists’ interpretive framings to make sense of food, their bodies, and athletic endeavours were rooted in performance ideologies, which was reinforced by the social networks around them. There was contestation to this, with some participants speaking to health-focused ideas and practices, but such instances were few and far between. Our participants also spoke to feeling pressures to hone and (under)fuel their bodies to look a certain way to achieve the status of being a ‘proper’ cyclist. In a subculture whereby the pursuit of sporting excellence is the dominant ideal, we argue that it should be expected athletes will develop narrow, performance-oriented meanings towards eating and their bodies. Conclusions stress that the socio-cultural and interactional processes in many sporting subcultures, which often enable the normative acceptance of behaviours that prioritise performance over health, need to be more readily questioned and challenged. If they are not, then health problems such as disordered eating will likely continue unabated across sport.