When Jacob Ward took up cycling during the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020, inspired by watching the Tour de France, he was instantly hooked. “I was so impressed by their feats of endurance that I wanted to be like them,” he remembers. But there was one hitch: as a former rugby player and keen bodybuilder since his teenage years, Ward was bulkier than the average road cyclist. “My physique was abnormal for a cyclist and I had quite a lot of pushback, negative comments, people assuming I wasn’t good enough for cycling because of how I looked.”
A social media influencer with over half a million followers across Instagram and TikTok, 23-year-old Ward was initially hesitant to post cycling content. And when he did, some of the comments were unkind. “Look at him, he thinks he’s a cyclist, but he’s clearly not,” he cites one such example. “Just because I was not an ectomorph [someone who is naturally light and thin] and didn’t look like a traditional cyclist, it didn’t mean I couldn’t be involved,” he adds.
If someone with a powerful, sculpted physique like Ward can find himself subject to judgemental comments, it barely needs spelling out that cycling holds aloft abnormal, arguably unhealthy
