Is Bicycling Bad for Your Bones?

(Getty Images)

By Gretchen Reynolds
NYT

In 2006, Aaron Smathers, then 29, was a graduate student in the Department of Health and Exercise Science at the University of Oklahoma, gathering data for a study of brittle bones in cyclists. One of his subjects was himself, since he’s been a bike racer for years. A recent scan had revealed that his bones were less dense than usual for a man his age. Not long after those results came in, he crashed during a race, snapping his collarbone. Six weeks later, in his first post-injury race, he was engulfed by a multi-rider pile-up, crashed again, and re-broke his collarbone. Worse, he fractured his hip so badly that the ball of the ball-and-socket joint broke off. “Later I thought, well, this reinforces my study,” he says.

Is cycling bad for the bones? A number of intriguing studies published in the past 18 months, including Smathers’, have raised that possibility — an issue that has special resonance now, with this weekend’s start of the 2009 Tour de France. Certainly, the toll of broken bones among top-level racers is high. Famously, Lance Armstrong broke his collarbone this year, while Christian Vande Velde, another of America’s premier Tour hopes, fractured six bones, including three in his spine, during a crash at the Giro d’Italia in May.

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