‘I was better off stopping’: the gruelling toll of reaching the top

The brutal realities of dropping weight to stay competitive at the highest levels of professional cycling left world-class Wānaka cyclist Kim Cadzow unable to even look at her bike. She tells Ruairi O’Shea why she is retiring at the age of 24. When Kim Cadzow signed her first contract as a professional cyclist, the sky was the limit. For all the investment in aerodynamics and fancy carbon-fibre bicycles, racing a bike boils down to the relationship between the power a rider can generate and how much they weigh, and Cadzow was a power-to-weight prodigy. In 2023, Cadzow was plucked from the relative obscurity of Wānaka to ride for the female squad of the world’s best cycling team, the Netherlands-based Jumbo-Visma, riding for the reigning champions of the Tour de France and alongside Mariane Vos, widely considered the greatest female cyclist of all time. The trouble, at the highest level of the sport, was that once you’ve reached the limits of generating power, losing weight becomes the easiest way to improve your chances of victory. “Your ability to maintain high power at the lowest weight possible is the most valuable thing in cycling, and losing weight is the easiest possible way to get away from someone else in the peloton, especially up a climb,” Cadzow said. As Cadzow sought ever greater performance gains, she ate less than her nutritionists suggested. “The nutritionists were trying to get me to eat more, to be more consistent, and to improve my body’s ability to process food and convert it to energy, but I just wanted to be a bit less than what they thought I could or should be,” Cadzow said. Positively reinforcing Cadzow’s unsustainable diet was the fact it was working. In 2024, following a transfer to the American team Education First, Cadzow had a breakout year. [Missing Credit]Kim Cadzow (right) celebrates victory in the 2025 Cycling New Zealand Elite National Road Race title with team-mate Henrietta Christie. Photo: Supplied Cadzow finished sixth in the 2024 edition of Liege-Bastogne-Liege Femmes, one of Europe’s most historic races, finishing the race in a small group of the sport’s superstars, including women’s Tour de France winners Demi Vollering and Katarzyna Niewadoma. Later that year, Cadzow was selected to ride the 32.4km time trial for New Zealand at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, finishing seventh, just 35 seconds away from a bronze medal. Cadzow’s performance at the Olympics was impressive, but it masked what she described as the start of her slow decline as sustained under-fuelling precipitated a period of regular illness and injury. Cadzow was selected to ride the Tour de France Femmes (the women’s Tour de France) in 2024, but tested positive for Covid-19 and did not start the race, before developing a series of infections in her mouth and two bouts of gastroenteritis in the second half of the year. Cadzow was still capable of putting a performance together at the highest level, winning the road and national time trial titles at the national championships in February 2025. But behind the scenes, the wheels were coming off. Cadzow said throughout 2025 she was regularly ill, going through seven or eight courses of antibiotics, and had trouble breathing, which she now knows are common symptoms of Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S). High Performance New Zealand describes RED-S as “a state of athlete health where the functioning of multiple body systems and functions are impaired . . . caused by a mismatch between energy intake from diet and the energy used in exercise”. [Missing Credit]Kim Cadzow on her way to winning the women's time trial at the 2025 road national championships. Photo: Supplied Cadzow suffered low bone density — experiencing a series of musculoskeletal injuries — and did not have a menstrual cycle for seven years as a result of the gap between what she was consuming and what she was burning. Through the second half of 2025, Cadzow began to work with a dietitian in New Zealand with a view to returning to cycling in 2026 as an advocate for health in the sport, but the break offered a new sense of perspective. “I enjoyed myself a lot more off the bike, and I decided that for my physical health and mental clarity, that I was better off stopping,” Cadzow said. Cadzow believes that her knowledge and experiences can be used to help other athletes, and will be looking to share those insights as she embarks on a career in health and fitness in Wānaka. For Cadzow, the hardest part of retirement was letting go of opportunities that her younger self would have killed for, but accepting and announcing her departure from the sport has been a weight off her shoulders. [Missing Credit]Cadzow poses with her retirement project, 12-week old puppy, Daisy. Photo: Ruairi O'Shea “I have days where I’m watching the Tour de France and I question whether I could still be doing it, but I put it in perspective and think about what’s behind it . . . it’s not just standing on a podium,” Cadzow said. “Cycling was my life, but I was getting to the point where I hated even looking at my bikes. “Now I’m looking forward to being able to go out on a ride with a group, enjoy having a coffee and a cake, and just do it because I want to.” ruairi.oshea@odt.co.nz