The men’s Olympic triathlon finally took place on Wednesday, but that wasn’t the only multisport news this week with Tokyo gold medalist and former Ironman winner Kristian Blummenfelt’s coach making a bold statement that the Norwegian phenom plans to switch to road racing with a goal of winning the Tour de France in 2028.
In an interview with the Norwegian newspaper TV2Coach Olav Aleksander Bu said Blummenfelt plans to switch sports in 2025 and spend a few years acclimating to the peloton before making the move to the Tour. “We think we’ll really test it in 2027, and then we’ll reach the goal of going full throttle in the Tour de France in 2028,” Bu said. He’s 90 percent certain the switch will happen, he added.
It’s an ambitious plan. But as much as we love “moon shot” goals in sport, this one will never, ever, ever happen. The fact that it’s treated with half-hearted credulity in some corners of the media and the triathlon world is akin to the New York Times I was wondering wisely the other day whether Elon Musk’s predictions about Tesla self-driving taxis by the fall might not come true.
Victor Campenaerts, for his part, thinks that Blummenfelt’s goals are realistic. But with all due respect to the Tour stage winner, I don’t agree with him at all. Here’s why.
He is too old
If Blummenfelt were 25, he might have a chance. But he’s 30; in 2028, he’ll be 34, the same age as Cadel Evans, the oldest Tour winner in the modern era (after World War II). Evans, of course, also switched sports as a two-time world champion in mountain biking. Although he already had elite road racing experience, including a partial season in 2001 with Saeco, when he switched to full-time road racing with Mapei in 2002 (at age 25, coincidentally), it took him four full seasons to crack the top 10 of a Grand Tour and two more to reach the podium.
To follow that trajectory, Blummenfelt would have to progress through the sport 1.5 times faster than Evans, starting from a base of less road racing experience and starting five years older.
He is too tall
Blummenfelt is a phenomenal athlete, there’s no doubt about it. But his body is built for triathlon and he’s too big to win a Tour at the moment. He weighs 165 pounds and stands 5’9″. A glance at his chest and shoulders confirms that he’s actually built like a slump. (He did a good bit of cycling in Paris but eventually faded on the run, finishing 12th.)
Blummenfelt and Bu are likely counting on him to lose a good chunk of muscle so he can compete with 65kg all-rounders/time trialists like Tadej Pogačar. It will take him seasons (plural) to safely lose that weight and reshape his body for cycling. And there is no guarantee they can do that while fully preserving his best athleticism.
Blu and Bu, as they are called, are probably counting on the fact that the weight loss puts Blummenfelt in a competitive W/kg range. But this is purely speculative: there are no 40-minute climbs in triathlons; Blummenfelt’s training data may not be entirely relevant. This calculation is also probably based in part on Blummenfelt’s mythical and mind-blowing absolute VO2Max of 103. But I would be cautious about this for two reasons.
First, it’s a number put forward by his coach, which has not been independently confirmed. Furthermore, there are some falsifications. Blummenfelt’s absolute score was actually 96, but because he was heavier at the time of testing (in January) than during the season, Bu claimed that the actual, adjusted number was around 103. There’s more than a little fat in that claim, and it didn’t involve Blummenfelt’s belly, because Bu didn’t reveal the relative, weight-adjusted number.
The athlete with the most reliable and known absolute VO2Max in endurance sports is another Norwegian, former junior world road champion Oskar Svendsen, who scored 96.7. VO2Max is notoriously unreliable at the upper limits. Out Columnist Alex Hutchinson pointed out in an article about the limitations of the tests that maximal oxygen uptake equipment was not designed for elite athletes. Take most claims with a grain of salt unless they are independently validated like Svendsen’s.
Second, even if measured accurately, VO2Max can accurately reflect aerobic fitness, but it is far from an accurate indicator of endurance fitness. It’s one thing to be good at exercise, but in cycling, aspects like metabolic and mechanical efficiency (basically, an athlete’s ability to convert their effort into watts) and aerodynamics are just some of the other critical factors to consider.
Blummenfelt is probably pretty solid on all of these counts, since they also matter in triathlon. But all we know about his abilities is in triathlon, where he is among the top riders but is not as dominant as Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard in stage races. How does he compare to these two generational talents?
He is too inexperienced
These factors are purely physical. Blummenfelt will have to overcome another set of obstacles, which essentially boil down to: Can he overcome a 10-year learning curve in just four years? A rider like Pogačar or Remco Evenepoel has been racing for a decade or more, a period in which they have honed their skills and learned many lessons, some of them the hard way. Blummenfelt does not have that sport-specific knowledge and will have to acquire it at the WorldTour level rather than progressing through smaller races and pelotons.
How does he behave in a pack? Is he good on the descent? Is he comfortable in the chaos of a support caravan? Can he fight for position when it counts and Nils Politt, a bit like a hovel himself, gently pushes him out of Pogačar’s wheel? How will he behave taking feeds from the roadside or the team car? Is he a quick learner of tactics?
And then there’s the mental side: can he do all that, day in and day out, for 21 days straight? On narrow, rough roads, in rain and heat, in crosswinds and on cobblestones and dirt, and at 2,000 metres, knowing that a snowy descent awaits him? Facing pressure from fans, sponsors, team management, the media?
Pro cycling has several other faces in the peloton who come from other sports, such as triathlete Cameron Wurf and ski mountaineer Anton Palzer. But none of them are looking to win the sport’s most prestigious event, and Palzer has struggled to adapt to the WorldTour. Among the most notable success stories, Michael Woods was a former university rider who set several Canadian junior records but spent three years racing for continental teams before joining the WorldTour.
The most successful inter-sport transfer? That would of course be former ski jumper Primož Roglič. But Roglič spent three seasons competing on the continental stage and another three at WorldTour level before he scored a top-five finish in a Grand Tour – at the age of 28, meaning he made the switch even earlier than Evans.
He doesn’t have the team
Even if Blummenfelt manages to piece together the rest of the puzzle, the team factor alone could make or break his quest. Blummenfelt has been linked in some reports to Jayco AlUla, though the team itself has said Bike On Monday, it was revealed that the rumor was just that, a rumor. The main connection seems to be that Blummenfelt’s bike sponsor is Giant, which is Jayco’s bike partner. But Blummenfelt also has a long-standing relationship with Red Bull, which explains the inevitable connections that exist.
Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe would make more sense in some ways. Red Bull currently has Roglič on hand, who would be a fantastic mentor for any Grand Tour aspirant; Red Bull will need to develop one, as the 34-year-old Slovenian is only under contract until 2025. There is talk of a move to Tom Pidcock or Remco Evenepoel, but as with Blummenfelt-Jayco, these are just rumours for now.
In any case, it must be acknowledged that professional cycling is a particular mathematical field: in the last five editions of each of the three Grand Tours, only two have been won by riders from teams other than UAE Team Emirates, Visma-Lease a Bike or Ineos Grenadiers (one of them, it should be noted, was Jai Hindley of Bora).
Teams rise and fall. Ineos, for example, is nowhere near the giant it was five years ago. Red Bull, with a bit of work and time, could reach the level of UAE and Visma, perhaps Lidl-Trek. But the inescapable reality of professional road racing today is that to win the Tour de France, you have to be part of one of the best teams in the sport. At the moment, there are only two. Neither of them needs the services of a Norwegian triathlete, and the ones that could are not at their level. Roglič was not Roglič before he joined Jumbo, but neither was the team at the top; it took time to build both.
If Blummenfelt could pull it off, it would be one of the most incredible feats in endurance sports history. But if, as his coach Bu says, they are competing for a high overall ranking – say, in the top five – in 2027, I will publish this story and feast on my words.
Dreams are inspiring, whether it’s the vision of a world of clean, safe, autonomous cars or the idea that the sport’s best triathlete could transform into a Tour de France winner with a little hard work and dedication.
But sometimes they are just dreams.
What did you think of this story?
