The men’s Olympic triathlon was finally run on Wednesday, but that wasn’t the only multisport news this week with the bold statement from Tokyo gold medalist and former Ironman winner Kristian Blummenfelt’s coach saying the Norwegian phenom plans to switch to road racing with a goal to win the Tour de France in 2028.
In an interview with Norway’s TV2, trainer Olav Aleksander Bu said Blummenfelt plans to change sports in 2025 and spend a couple of years adapting to the peloton before making a run at the Tour. “We think that we’ll really test it in 2027, and then the goal of going all-in on the Tour de France in 2028,” Bu said. The switch is 90% certain to happen, he added.
It’s an ambitious plan. But as much as we love moon shot-style goals in sports, this one is never, ever, ever going to happen. That it’s being treated with arms-length credulity in some corners of the media and tri world is akin to the New York Times sagely wondering the other day whether Elon Musk’s predictions of autonomous Tesla taxis by fall might not actually turn out.
Victor Campenaerts, for one, thinks Blummenfelt’s goals are realistic. But much as I respect the Tour stage winner, I strongly disagree. Here’s why.
He’s too old
If Blummenfelt was 25, maybe there’s a shot. But he’s 30; in 2028 he will be 34, the same age as Cadel Evans, the oldest modern-era (post-WWII) winner of the Tour. Evans, of course, was also a sport-switcher of sorts as a two-time world mountain bike champion. Even though he already had elite road racing experience including a partial 2001 season with Saeco, when he switched full-time to road with Mapei in 2002 (at, coincidentally, 25 years old) it took Evans four full seasons to get into the top 10 in a Grand Tour and two more to podium.
To match that trajectory, Blummenfelt would have to progress in the sport 1.5 times faster than Evans did, from a lesser base of road racing experience, and starting at five years older.
He’s too big
Blummenfelt is a phenomenal athlete, of that there is no doubt. But his body is built for triathlon and is, right now, too damn big to win a Tour. His reported weight is 75 kg / 165 lb and he is 1.76 m / 5’9” tall; one look at his chest and shoulders confirms he is in fact built like a brick shithouse. (He rode a strong bike leg in Paris but ultimately faded on the run to finish 12th.)
Blummenfelt and Bu are doubtless betting on him dropping a significant chunk of that muscle so he can compete with the 65 kg all-around climber/TT types like Tadej Pogačar. It will take seasons (plural) to safely drop that weight and reshape his body around cycling. And there’s no guarantee they can do it while fully preserving his best athletic attributes.
Blu and Bu, as they’re known, are likely banking on the math that dropping that weight puts Blummenfelt in a competitive W/kg range. But that’s purely speculative; there are no 40-minute climbs in triathlons; Blummenfelt’s training data may not be entirely relevant. That math is also probably partly based on Blummenfelt’s mythical, eye-popping absolute VO2Max of 103. But I’d voice caution about that for two reasons.
One: that’s a claimed figure by his coach, which hasn’t been independently confirmed. Also, there’s some fudging involved. Blummenfelt’s absolute score was actually 96 but because he was heavier at testing time (January) than in-season, Bu claimed the real, adjusted number was around 103. There’s more than a little fat in that claim and it wasn’t around Blummenfelt’s belly, because Bu didn’t disclose the relative, weight-adjusted figure.
The athlete with the highest reliably known absolute VO2Max in endurance sports is another Norwegian, former junior road world champion Oskar Svendsen, who scored a 96.7. VO2Max is notoriously unreliable at the upper limits. As Outside columnist Alex Hutchinson noted in a piece about the limits of testing, the equipment to measure maximal oxygen uptake was not designed with elite athletes in mind. Take most claims with a grain of salt unless they’re independently validated like Svendsen’s.
Two: even when accurately measured, VO2Max may accurately reflect aerobic capacity but is far from an exact predictor of endurance sports ability. It’s one thing to be good at exercise, but in cycling, aspects like metabolic and mechanical efficiency – roughly, how well an athlete can convert work into watts – and aerodynamics are just a few of the other vital factors to consider.
Blummenfelt is probably pretty solid on all those, because they matter in tri as well. But everything we know about his abilities is in reference to triathlon, where he is among the top racers but not anywhere near dominant in the way that Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard are in stage racing. How does he match up to those two generational talents?
He’s too inexperienced
Those above factors are entirely physical. There’s another whole set of obstacles that Blummenfelt will have to overcome that basically amount to: can he climb a 10-year learning curve of racecraft in just four years? A rider like Pogačar or Remco Evenepoel has been racing for a decade or more, time in which they’ve honed their skills and learned many lessons, some of them the hard way. Blummenfelt doesn’t have that sport-specific knowledge and will have to build it at the WorldTour level rather than progressing through smaller races and fields.
How are his pack skills? Is he a good descender? Is he comfortable riding in the chaos of a support caravan? Can he fight for position when it matters and Nils Politt, something of a brick shithouse himself, is not-so-gently nudging him off Pogačar’s wheel? How will he do taking feeds from the roadside or team car? Is he a fast learner at tactics?
Then there’s the mental side: Can he do all that, day in and day out, for 21 days in a row? On bad, narrow roads; in the rain and heat; in crosswinds and over cobbles or dirt; and at 2,000 meters knowing there’s a snowmelt-slicked descent coming up? Facing pressure from fans, sponsors, team officials, media?
Pro cycling has several other faces in the peloton who came from other sports – riders like triathlete Cameron Wurf and ski mountaineer Anton Palzer. But neither of them are trying to win the most storied event in the sport and Palzer has struggled to adapt to the WorldTour. Among more prominent success stories, Michael Woods was a former collegiate runner who set several Canadian junior records, but spent three years racing for Continental teams before joining the WorldTour.
The most successful cross-sport transfer? It has to be former ski jumper Primož Roglič of course. But again, Roglič spent three seasons racing Continental, and it was three more at the WorldTour level before he cracked a Grand Tour top-five result – at 28 years old, meaning he made the sport switch earlier even than Evans.
He doesn’t have the team
Even if Blummenfelt puts 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, although the team itself told Velo on Monday that the talk was entirely a rumor. The primary connection seems to be that Blummenfelt’s bike sponsor is Giant, which is the bike partner for Jayco. But Blummenfelt also has a longstanding relationship with Red Bull, so cue the inevitable connections there.
Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe would make more sense in some ways. Red Bull currently has Roglič on hand, who would make 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 through 2025. There’s talk of a run at Tom Pidcock or Remco Evenepoel, but as with the Blummenfelt-Jayco chatter it’s rumor at this point.
In either case, however, there’s a different kind of math in pro cycling that we must acknowledge. That is: in the past five editions of each of the three Grand Tours, just two have been won by riders on teams other than UAE Team Emirates, Visma-Lease a Bike, or Ineos Grenadiers (one of those, we should note, was Bora’s Jai Hindley).
Teams rise and fall; Ineos, for example, is nowhere near the juggernaut it was even five years ago. Red Bull, with some work and time, could get to the level of UAE and Visma; maybe Lidl-Trek as well. But the inescapable reality of pro road racing today is that to win the Tour de France, you have to be on one of the very best teams in the sport. Right now, there are just two; neither of them needs the services of a Norwegian triathlete, and the ones that might aren’t at their level. Roglič wasn’t Roglič before joining Jumbo, but neither was the team at the top; it took time to build both.
If Blummenfelt were to pull this off somehow, it would be one of the most amazing feats in endurance sports history. But if, as his coach Bu says, they’re in competition a high overall placing – let’s say top five – in 2027, I will print this story out and eat my words.
Dreams are inspiring, whether it’s a vision of a world of clean, safe, self-driving cars or the idea that the best triathlete in the sport could reshape himself into a Tour de France winner with a little hard work and dedication.
But sometimes, they’re only dreams.
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