I don’t often watch GCN videos as they tend to be pretty cringe these days, but this one tallying the weight of every pro team bike did catch my eye. At the Tour Down Under in Adelaide last month, the GCN crew weighed every team bike they could get their hands on! Now that’s the sort of content I’m here for! 😂

Spoiler alert if you didn’t watch the video: Only two bikes came in under 7kg!

While I knew that top end road bikes were heavier these days, that did surprise me. I would have expected most high-budget professional teams to have dialled this in by now. Many of these are USD $10,000+ bikes!

Those weights above are “complete” including cages, mounts, pedals, etc. You might notice there is one professional team missing; Israel Premier Tech. I do not know why GCN didn’t weigh or include or even mention their bike, but I can confirm they were riding the at the time unreleased new Factor Ostro VAM. This new Ostro is touted to be super light. Lighter than the (very light) previous version. Hmm. My hunch is it was still under embargo. 🤔

As a comparison, my 2020 Canyon Aeroad (the last “proper aggressive” Aeroad before Canyon relaxed the geometry for the MAMIL crowd) with 50mm deep wheels comes in at 7.2kg. It’s not even the top-level lightweight SLX Dura Ace model. Only three of the pro peloton bikes they weighed were lighter than my older Aeroad.

But does it actually matter? Well, to you and I, no. I cannot tell the difference when riding with a full water bottle compared to an empty one. That’s an easy 500 grams. For the pros? It probably does matter at the pointy end. According to GCN, the time difference up Alpe d’Huez between the heaviest and lightest bike is in the region of 26 seconds. Many a mountain stage has been won/lost by far less than that.

To answer the question in the title; why so heavy? The answer is of course, disc brakes!

Okay, so that’s only part of the reason, but it’s an easy change to blame. Before the introduction of disc brakes and aerodynamically shape tubing, it was easy for the top-of-the-line road bikes to be built well below the UCI limit of 6.8kg. There’s even credible reports that some team mechanics added lead weights into seat tubes to stop bikes falling foul of the rule.

So what does all this mean? Not much, unless you’re racing Grand Tours. Bike weights are a nice thing to talk about and compare, but the difference in performance is marginal. I’ll leave you with this though; I’d still prefer a lighter bike up a steep mountain climb any day of the week, but coming down the other side in the rain? Give me any one of the disc-brake equipped machines.