Study: Parenthood Negatively Affects Professional Male Cyclist

Professional athletes employ a range of implements to optimize their performance. Decreases in elite-level performances are often associated with a range of factors, including injuries, getting older, and motivation. Now, parenthood can be added to that list.

A recent study by researchers at KU Leuven (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), a research university in Belgium, found that becoming a father adversely impacts the cycling performance of professional road cyclists. The dataset gathered from CQ Ranking, ProCyclingStats, and other sources focused on 267 riders with a total of 403 children, of which 237 were first-born children, between 2001 and 2019.

In evaluating 18 years of data, researchers compared cyclists’ performance results in the year before a child's birth and race results 120 days after the child's birth. A second analysis was conducted with a comparison period extending to 150 days after the child's birth to account for race schedule fluctuation and other variables.

The study considered several key factors that could impact a cyclist’s ranking. These included whether they were a team leader or domestique, the amount of time on a team, and the number of races in a cyclist’s home country. Researchers also controlled for the Olympic games, as the opportunity to compete on the world stage could influence the number of races a cyclist attends, points allotment, and race outcome. Finally, the study considered whether a child was born during the race season versus off-season as a potential mitigating factor.

Most notably, Visma | Lease a Bike rider, Wout van Aert, left before stage 18 of the 2023 Tour de France because of the birth of his second child. Possibly an outlier to this study, Van Aert placed second in the Road Race World Championships, GC winner for the Tour of Britain, and first place in Coppa Bernocchi. Compared to 2022, when he placed fourth in the Road Race World Championships.

In the end, researchers found that despite the average male cyclist’s performance peaking around age 28–the average age of study participants was 29.24 years–when comparing race outcomes in the year before a professional male cyclist has a child and the year after up to 120 and 150 days after birth, the new addition yielded “a negative impact…on performance.” The impact is most significant with the first child. Factors that may impact cyclists’ performance in the weeks after a child’s birth include worrying, risk-taking, fatigue, reduced exercise activity, and hormonal changes—lower testosterone levels.