Michael Barry: Sports psychology does not play a big enough part in pro cycling
The former pro weighs in on an important aspect in the sport that seems to be lacking
Bike racing requires grit, sacrifice, and passion. The physical demands are met with mental fortitude.
Teammates will celebrate together. One rider will have crossed the line in triumph, but they all had a role. Champagne will be sipped; accolades will be shared. But the celebration will be short-lived, as they return to a world of contrast. The following day they may wake up to the sounds of pouring rain on the hotel window, knowing they have hours to ride over snow-covered peaks. They may turn over to feel the wounds from a crash that have yet to heal.
Without timeouts or substitutions, riders persist through pain, injury, and illness to race another day. They will have gone to bed knowing the race plan, where their job may be to sit on the front of the peloton, in the wind, for hours to set up their leader for victory. They will cross the finish line, answer journalists’ questions, clean the grime off their bodies, rebandage wounds, speak on the phone with their families, who they won’t see for months at a time, and eat a feast, knowing tomorrow they will have another race to ride. The intrinsic and extrinsic pressure to perform can often feel overwhelming, even for those at the top. They will face constant scrutiny and praise from around the world through social media channels. It is their passion for the sport that fuels them, but at times, mentally, even that love can run low, and the pursuit can seem pointless and dark.
In their search for every marginal gain, cycling teams, coaches, and racers now have a deep understanding of physiology, training, and nutrition. In that pursuit, the understanding of how the brain works, and how it influences individual and team performance, and more broadly, racers’ lives, has often been neglected. Cycling lags most other sports when it comes to mental well-being and performance. As the technical and physical performance gains are maximized, teams will look to place more focus on mental well-being, which will also result in a healthier, happier peloton.
Cycling culture has always glorified the struggle. Suffering is embraced, marketed, and idealized. Clothing brands whose clients are predominantly wealthy white-collar men have been built around images of working-class, grimacing, battered, and grime-covered riders. Those who rose up from the road after a crash, climbed back on their bikes with cuts or worse, to help their team and get to the finish so they could race another day, are heralded for their heroism. Their hope and belief appear impenetrable.
Perhaps it is the primitive human instincts of courage, calculation, and willpower that the spectator admires, or perhaps we are simply rubbernecking, watching the action from the comfort of the sidelines, taking pity but also content that it is not us. Either way, the struggle isn’t always necessary. When trauma occurs, it leaves lasting mental marks on the racers and pushes some away from the sport. Broken, anxious, or unhappy racers aren’t productive.
Mindfulness and well-being are often buried, as historically, riders and management were trained to plough on, to toughen up, and to accept and absorb the darker aspects of racing. Like cycling, NFL football is a sport of grit and aggression.
On the field, violence is embraced, and toughness is idolized. In macho, male-dominated sports, where braggadocio has often ruled, mental health care was considered a weakness. Yet players and teams are now openly working to better understand their psychology to improve their performance and quality of life.
Recently, A.J. Brown of the Philadelphia Eagles was seen reading Inner Excellence on the sidelines between plays during a recent playoff game. During games, he refers to his dog-eared book to improve his performance by having a better understanding of his psychology. Reading it gave him a “sense of peace” in the middle of an intense and pivotal game. On the football field, embracing mental well-being is no longer considered a weakness but a strength.
Jim Murphy, author of Inner Excellence, has been in Philadelphia all weekend as A.J. Brown invited him to the divisional playoff game.
More on the story of the book A.J. was reading on the sidelines tomorrow on Eagles Pregame Live. pic.twitter.com/nS0RmsWYke
— Ashlyn Sullivan (@ashlynrsullivan) January 18, 2025
The best coaches and team management will try to guide their riders through the tough periods, empathizing, knowing how hard to push them and when to back off and suggest they rest. Educating them on how to properly care for their riders’ mental health will improve the team environment on most levels. As an amateur racer in France, my veteran directeur sportif, Christian Rumeau, would stop by my apartment every few days, sit down with me for a cup of tea, and chat.
After a few months, I realized it was in those conversations, where he could see my expressions and body language, that he would gauge whether I needed a mental break from the bike. “Put on your running shoes, go into Geneva, and enjoy a day away,” he would suggest. Having coached a generation of top English-speaking cyclists, notably, Sean Kelly, he could empathize with the loneliness a foreigner living in a small French town may face. To me, living alone in France, those moments over tea were therapy, as I felt support and care, something that is often missing in the ruthlessness of elite cycling.
Some teams have sports psychologists on staff, and famously, Team Sky’s ethos was built with the guidance of Steve Peters, a psychiatrist, but generally, cycling is far behind other sports. Often, paid medical staff are not independent, as they are biased toward the team, where their paychecks come from, blurring ethical lines. If you watch most behind-the-scenes cycling documentaries or videos, such as the recent series on Netflix, Tour de France: Unchained, it is quickly apparent which teams have even a remote understanding of psychology and which you would never want your child racing for. Of course, at the junior and amateur levels, where budgets are smaller and oversight is minimal, old habits, tough love, and uneducated coaching often persist, turning kids away or negatively affecting them for life.
Generation Z, the young riders who are now dominating the sport, think differently than past generations, and how they are coached should adapt to their mindsets. Generally, they are better educated and more collaborative. They will also question process and purpose, unlike past generations, and won’t tolerate environments where they are not comfortable.
Building a strong ethical and holistic structure within the team while also teaching racers how to understand, process, heal, and deal with different scenarios, whether on or off the bike, will have positive outcomes on every level: riders and staff will be happier, healthier, work together uniformly, and ultimately, be more successful. For the staff, the demands of working with a team are equally challenging, and burnout is common. With support, their careers will also be longer.
Cycling is a power-to-weight sport, where body weight influences performance. This leads to disordered eating, which is common—it is rare to find a professional rider who hasn’t struggled with their diet at some point in their careers. Many riders have low bone density as a result, or worse, develop extreme eating disorders. Team environments have often supported disordered eating habits, as initially, rapid weight loss improves performance. Although bad advice persists, especially at the lower levels of the sport, nutrition within teams has improved. But due to the importance of diet on performance, riders still develop obsessions. Having unbiased dietary and mental health support within teams will further decrease anorexia and bulimia while also improving the riders’ general and long-term health and happiness.
In retirement, racers have difficulty transitioning away from elite sport, where they have lived and worked in a structured environment. Most days are planned out towards achieving goals, they are idolized by the fans, catered to by the team staff, and passionate about their careers. Dealing with life outside of the racing bubble can be daunting, and many athletes can easily slide into depression or substance abuse. Proper retirement planning and support during their careers can ease the transition, something few teams now give.
Over the last decades, cycling has become increasingly scientific. Once a black art, based on lore, experience, and sometimes pseudoscience, professionals and amateurs now have a profound understanding of performance metrics and the influence of training and physiology and how they affect outcomes. Perhaps because of our myopic focus on data, we have missed studying and advancing the psychological aspects of performance.
Data analysis is influencing every aspect of cycling, chiefly training. Every possible metric is recorded, logged, and analyzed, from sleep to power to distance. As AI becomes more prescient and computer-generated training programs improve, the coach’s role will evolve further to that of a psychologist and in-person trainer.
Coaching online, we fail to see how the athlete is moving on their bike, and how they are adapting to the training and, most importantly, their emotional expressions off the bike. Although a rider’s physical strength determines a large percentage of their performance, cycling requires a high amount of skill, which is determined by training, bike position, tactical acumen, and mental focus—elements that are difficult, or even impossible, to coach online.
Cyclists are often told to harden up, even in the hardest moments. How much further and faster could a rider who is supported with proper mental health care go? How much happier and healthier would they be if they learned to manage the stressors of elite racing, which would also improve their resilience?
Michael Barry is a former WorldTour rider, author and co-owner of Mariposa Bicycles.