Becoming a father could negatively impact professional road cycling performance, finds research

Researchers from a Belgian university have claimed that parenthood can cause a decline in the performance of male professional road cyclists, attributing it to a number of facts such as physical and emotional fatigue, hormonal factors and a reduced tendency to take more risks.

The study, published in Cogent Social Sciences was done by the faculty of economics and business at Belgium’s oldest university KU Leuven, was aimed at investigating the performances of male pro cyclists before and after having either the first or the subsequent child.

The performances were assessed using the ‘cycling quotient’ (CQ) score, which is a world ranking of professional road cyclists, based on their performances during the last 12 months, built on an old ranking system used by the UCI.

As of now, the top spots are taken by (take a guess) two-time Tour de France winner Jonas Vingegaard, former road and current time trial world champion Remco Evenepoel, and two-time Tour de France and five-time monument (seven, if you count Strade Bianche) winner Tadej Pogačar, with scores of 3365, 3313, and 3003, respectively.

They compared the performances of riders over two different periods of 120 and 150 days, once before becoming a parent, which serves as the reference point, and then after having a child using a data regression model, commonly employed to analyse these sorts of variances.

A number of variables were also taken into account, such as race kilometres, age, relative role in the team, team strength, first child or subsequent child, or if it was the rider had recently joined a new team — all factors which could have an effect on performance.

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The researchers found that a pro cyclist scores an average of 21.87 CQ points less during the 120 days after having a child than he achieved during the same period the year before. However, the impact of a first child is more significant than that of a second or third child, with the CQ dropping 39.04 when a rider becomes a father for the first time.

The difference could dropping from sixth to seventh place on the UCI’s CQ charts — as of now, Mads Pederson and Wout van Aert are separated by just 32 points. Or for more context, the difference could mean finishing ninth instead of eighth in the Tour de France general classification.

And considering the importance of physical, emotional and hormonal factors for a pro cyclist’s performance, researchers pointed to evidence from previous studies showing that raising children comes with higher levels of fatigue and physical symptoms such as headaches and nausea, or irregular sleeping pattern.

There’s also evidence that fathers are less likely to take risks than men without children, and in a cycling context, it could mean riders with children could start to show more careful and measured riding behaviour than they did before having a child, according to the researchers.

Finally, during and after their wives’ pregnancy, men have lower testosterone levels on average, which is related to hormonal fatigue and could negatively affect athletic performance, they said.

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The researchers added: “This finding is of practical importance, because it shows that it is important to pay attention to the developments in the private lives of professional athletes. A better understanding of these developments can contribute to a better mental and/or sports management of professional athletes.”

They also pointed out that the research is only limited to road cyclists, and proposed a thoughtful new research idea for any sports scientists out there: Could becoming a father also negatively impact performance for cyclocross or mountain bike riders?