The science behind the cyclist: How Olympic champ Kelsey Mitchell is working to be ‘the fastest girl in the world’ again

This testing, 15 months ahead of her races in a Paris velodrome, is part of Cycling Canada’s efforts to boost performance and give Mitchell, who set a world speed record on the track just two years after she started cycling, her best shot to win another Olympic gold medal.

She is hunched over her bike on a platform, elbows at her knees, hands in front on the bars, feet motionless with the pedals locked. Wisps of blond hair flying wildly around the back of her helmet are the only indication of the forces she is bracing against.

Guy Larose, the senior technical director at RWDI, an engineering consulting firm, is overseeing this testing in Guelph, Ont. Normally, he simulates the effect of wind on long-span bridges and highrise buildings looking to improve construction and stability. With athletes, he measures the aerodynamics of different equipment and body positions in search of the fastest combination, backed by data.

“We’re working today with the fastest girl in the world,” he says. “When you know you have the best for you, it’s a double advantage — it’s like your second wind.”

Only Mitchell is not the fastest anymore and, more than that, she’s struggling on and off the bike.

“Everyone’s talking about aerodynamics and all these little things where I’m like, I’m going to be s—- at the Olympics if I don’t get my body sorted,” she says later.

A former university soccer player from Alberta, Mitchell didn’t even own a bicycle when she suddenly became a track cyclist, at the age of 23, after demonstrating an incredible ability to produce power on the watt bike at an RBC Training Ground event in 2017. From there, it was a straight line to a series of international successes: a Pan American Games sprint title, a world record in the 200-metre sprint, Olympic gold in Tokyo in 2021.

She remembers people saying her career wasn’t normal: “Nobody joins a sport and only has success.”

A year later, at the 2022 Commonwealth Games, she topped out at silver. “I was like, ‘Why didn’t I get gold?’ ”

Mitchell, now 30, says she is competitive to a fault and doubled down on what got her to the podium in Tokyo: “Hyperfocus, work through pain, go, go, go … I just didn’t know when to stop.”

She lost confidence in what she had been doing, started questioning and changing everything from her training to her position on the bike. Too many things, too quickly. It was a “constant battle of trying to figure out why I’m not going faster.” She had debilitating back pain, couldn’t maintain the aerodynamic position she had in Tokyo and couldn’t produce the sheer power she was known for.

“Every trait that I have that made me an Olympic champion is basically what broke me.”

Testing the limits

Cycling has a reputation, developed in part by generations of characters in the Tour de France, as a suffer-fest that requires riders to withstand pain and keep going. Trying to improve aerodynamics in a wind tunnel doesn’t change that, says Kris Westwood, Cycling Canada’s high-performance director.

“The rider still has to ride and hurt and suffer but you can also measure what ways you’re making them go faster with the same amount of suffering. It never gets easier, it just gets faster.”

Most of the pedalling power a cyclist produces gets used up overcoming aerodynamic drag — the air resistance they face that keeps them from going faster.

Top international cycling federations do a lot of testing in wind tunnels looking for ways to reduce that drag, but Cycling Canada has just one day, made possible by a $35,000 innovation grant from Own the Podium. It’s testing race suits, shoe covers, handlebars, helmets, and body positioning, primarily with Mitchell and Lauriane Genest, an Olympic bronze medallist in keirin.

A lot of mathematical theory and computer modelling was put into this aerodynamic optimization project beforehand, but the wind tunnel is the only way to know for sure if those gains on paper can be replicated on a bike. “In six minutes, we’ll know if $1,500 handlebars are worth the expense,” Westwood says.

Turns out they are. The $5,000 bespoke race suits, however, are not. That’s as important a finding because it means that money can be put toward something else the team needs.

The most potential for aerodynamic gains comes through the rider’s position on the bike but there’s always a cost to those changes. “It could be comfort, the ability to build power, it could actually cause injuries and it’s constrained by regulations,” Westwood says.

In Mitchell’s case, thanks to a new handlebar, helmet and a couple of other things, they were able cut about 200 grams of drag at 70 km/h — close to a 10 per cent improvement. That’s significant in sprint cycling where winning can come down to the thousandth of a second. Mitchell won Olympic gold by being 0.061 and 0.064 seconds ahead of her opponent in the final sprint across the line.

Mitchell tests position changes in the tunnel but the fine-tuning of her race position is dictated by biomechanics more than aerodynamics. “The aero testing is so good, we need it. But me … I need to sort out the big thing,” she says.

That means fixing her back pain and finding a position on the bike that lets her produce the same kind of power she could in Tokyo.

Comeback from injury

When Mitchell started racing on the steeply banked oval tracks, she had a natural, efficient, aerodynamic position, right down to a slight tilt of her head that was validated in the tunnel as making her faster. “My body just knew what to do.”

In Tokyo, and for a time afterward, as sprint coach Franck Durivaux puts it, she was also “physically over the world.” She had no need for energy-saving race tactics, she could win from the front.

“Also, I think she didn’t have any doubts. That was the big difference in the last two years, she built many doubts for herself in many, many areas and maybe she shouldn’t have because she was still the same,” he says. “Every time I saw her touching something on the bike, it broke my heart. No, no, no, not again.”

Mitchell stepped away from racing in late 2023 to focus on training and rehabilitation and didn’t come back until the Nations Cup in Milton in April. She didn’t make it to the podium there, unlike the previous two years, but clinched Paris qualifications in sprint and team sprint.

And there were other positives. Her power on the bike is “really close to her best level” and her tactical and technical riding skills, which she didn’t have at her first Olympics, are much stronger, Durivaux says.

And Mitchell was smiling. “My legs showed up,” she says.

“Body is feeling better and better. We’re not there yet, but that’s OK, we’ve got four months to put it together. Mentally, I’m there; physically we’re getting there,” she said. “I haven’t taken Advil for my back in like four months so that’s a big win.

“I have so much belief in myself that I have no doubt that I will be back where I need to be.”

Mitchell once spoke of her job in the simplest of terms: “Pedal hard and turn left.”

Now, heading to her second Olympics, she says she knows “every single detail of the body and the science, the drafting, the wind tunnel.”

She has come to learn that keeping in check her desire to push herself — sometimes too hard and not always in the right direction — may be the hardest part of cycling.

“If I win in Paris, I would be so proud of myself,” she says. “I’ve learned so much more from losing than I ever did from winning.”