From a ‘skinny broken girl into a strong woman’ – Clara Koppenburg finds new strength in gravel after battling an eating disorder

When I ran into Clara Koppenburg a few months ago in Emporia, Kansas, she looked stronger and healthier than I had perhaps ever seen her.

After a split-second hesitation, I told her so. Commenting on someone’s body is always delicate territory, and particularly when that person has spoken publicly about struggling with an eating disorder. But the change I saw in Koppenburg wasn’t simply physical. She seemed happy, strong and at ease in a way I hadn’t always seen before.

Luckily, it was an observation she was happy to hear, and surprisingly willing to address.

“I really made that change from a really skinny, kind of broken girl to a quite strong woman,” the 31-year-old told me. “I think I still have some progress to do to really put more body weight into power. But I’m on a good way, and I’m happy with the change.”

And mentally? I ventured.

“Oh, I’m doing a lot better,” she assured with a broad smile.

Koppenburg spent a decade as a professional road racer, building a reputation as a talented climber and racing for teams such as Bigla, WNT-Rotor, Rally Cycling, EF-Oatly-Cannondale and, most recently, Cofidis. But last year she publicly revealed just how damaging the pursuit of performance, and particularly the pursuit of being lighter, had become.

As a climber on the road, she had spent years in a discipline where body weight gets tangled up with performance. In her public account of her eating disorder, she said that being regarded as a climber only pushed her further towards weight loss.

“I wasn’t healthy. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t me,” she wrote at the time. She also revealed that after six years without a period, it had finally returned. Recovery, she explained, had meant accepting fluctuations in weight, hormones and power-to-weight ratio. It also meant accepting that becoming healthier could, at least temporarily, make her feel as though she was moving backwards as an athlete.

In 2025, she got herself admitted to a clinic, and called on teams and the wider cycling industry not merely to acknowledge RED-S and eating disorders, but to give athletes the time and support required to recover.

Changing disciplines is no magic cure, nor does it erase the complicated relationship between food, body weight and performance that can develop over years in elite sport. But this season, she’s feeling strong. She walked away from road racing and is racing gravel for the Tudor Pro Cycling Gravel team.

“I just felt like I needed a new challenge, some new races,” she told me when I asked about the switch. “And yeah, now I’m on gravel, and I’m so happy.

“It’s so much fun, the whole atmosphere, the racing. There are so many different things in the race happening, and you constantly have to be concentrated and adapt to every situation. It makes it super interesting. I love it.”

There is another aspect of gravel that seems particularly significant for Koppenburg: in her experience so far, it shifts the focus towards strength, durability and the ability to keep producing power hour after hour.

“The gravel races, they are pretty long,” she said. “You really need more resources. You can’t just always be on the limit with your body weight, I think. And it’s also a lot more powerful racing.”

There are technical demands, too. On loose surfaces, she explained, a rider can’t simply jump out of the saddle every time more power is needed.

“You have to have seated power because you can’t just go out of saddle.”

These days, Koppenburg wants to “put more body weight into power.” Her focus is on getting faster by getting stronger, rather than lighter.

Her first Unbound Gravel offered a test of those demands. In the muddiest edition in recent memory, a true challenge for rider and equipment, Koppenburg finished inside the top 20. She then went on to score a top-10 at the Hegau Gravel Race and a third-place finish at The Majestics, both part of the UCI Gravel World Series.

She is expected to compete at the UCI Gravel World Championships in Nannup, Western Australia, later this autumn.