Guillaume Martin has lashed out at bike sponsor Look after a disappointing Tour de France for himself and his Cofidis team.
Speaking to French newspaper, Le Monde, the 31-year-old criticised the bike's weight, which he cites as the reason for choosing not to run a power meter. Cofidis has since refuted his claims in a statement.
The French rider, who joined Cofidis in 2020 after four years with Wanty-Gobert, finished 13th at the 2024 Tour, some 43 minutes down on race winner Tadej Pogaćar.
After the race, he laid the blame at the feet of his team and their bike, the Look 795 Blade RS. When asked about analysing his power data, he responded: "That’s impossible because I don’t have a power meter. Our bikes weigh 7.7 kilograms, one kilogram more than the allowed limit. I don’t want to make my bike even heavier with a 200-gram bike computer.
"We watch our weight all year through our diet, so 200 grams might not seem like much. But when you calculate with a bike that weighed a kilo too much, I wouldn’t have been 45 seconds behind the Pogacar group at the top of the Bonette [on stage 19]. I would have stayed with them and had time to eat better. Overall, I would have been calmer."
Le Monde's article appears to have been edited since its original publication to remove some of these comments, though the comments were repeated in other media outlets shortly afterwards.
The allowed limit he refers to is the 6.8kg minimum weight limit set by the UCI for all bikes in road racing disciplines. At 7.7kg, Martin's bike would be 900 grams heavier than otherwise possible within the rules.
The decision to eschew a power meter was not forced upon him, as far as Cyclingnews understands. While Martin opted to run a standard Shimano Dura-Ace R9200 chainset, many of his teammates used the SRM Origin Road PM9 power meter, complete with Look-branded carbon fibre cranks and Shimano Dura-Ace chainrings. The exact weight difference between the two solutions is unknown, but SRM claims a weight of between 542g and 608g, depending on spindle material, for the PM9 on 165mm carbon arms without chainrings. A comparable Dura-Ace crankset (also without chainrings) is 538g according to this blog.
In the days since Martin's comments, Cofidis has rebutted his criticisms and stood by its sponsor Look, as well as Look's in-house wheel brand Corima, in a post to its website entitled "The Cofidis team affirms its total confidence in Look and Corima."
"The bikes used by all the riders were designed jointly with our performance department and the design and research offices of our partners," the team's statement began. "Some of our riders actively participated in this design by providing their expertise and sharing their feelings, to offer the team high-tech equipment.
"The weight of the bikes is an important subject of attention, but it is not the only performance factor. The bike used by Guillaume Martin is the subject of specific equipment choices so as not to exceed 7.4 kg, a measurement slightly below the average of the bikes of the best riders in the peloton."
At the start of the Tour, Cyclingnews spent time with various teams getting hands-on with their bikes, and in doing so, weighed those that we were allowed to weigh.
Among the GC favourites, Jonas Vingegaard's Cervélo R5 bike was the lightest, tipping our scale at 6.7kg (and would need to add weight to race legally). Primož Roglič's Specialized Tarmac SL8 was bang on the 6.8kg limit, and although we didn't weigh the bike of Remco Evenepoel, we'd predict that it would be similar given they're both sponsored by the same brand. The eventual race winner, Tadej Pogaćar, was aboard a Colnago V4RS which weighed 7.2kg, 400 grams over the limit, despite a multitude of weight-saving hacks.
The Look bikes at Cofidis were among the few we didn't weigh, but at other teams, the number on our scale was commonly much closer to the 7.7kg that Martin mentions. Sprinter Mark Cavendish's bike was 7.62kg, for example. World Champion Mathieu van der Poel's Canyon Aeroad was 7.67kg, and EF Education EasyPost's Nielson Powless rode a Cannondale SuperSix Evo that tipped the scales at 7.82kg. Among the heaviest was the bike of Uno-X's Jonas Abrhamsen, who spent multiple days in the Polka Dot jersey. He rode aboard the new Dare Velocity Ace, an all-out aero bike which tipped our scales at 7.9kg.
These stats certainly put Guillaume Martin's 7.7kg claim towards the heavier end of the spectrum, especially when compared to those at the top of the race's general classification, but he wasn't the only rider on a bike in the high-seven-kilo range.
We have also won several victories in the 2023 Tour de France, the 2023 Vuelta and the 2024 Giro with this same bike.
Cofidis' statement
"Our riders benefit, with the LOOK 795 Blade RS frames, from cutting-edge equipment developed by our partners' engineers, offering a stiffness/aerodynamics/weight ratio approved by our riders for over a year," the team's statement continued. "We are convinced that these performances have allowed us and will allow us to compete with our competitors.
"We have also won several victories in the 2023 Tour de France, the 2023 Vuelta and the 2024 Giro with this same bike and have just finished once again with the highest-ranked French rider overall in this 2024 edition of the Tour de France. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our partners and especially the LOOK Cycle and CORIMA brands for their trust and the involvement of their teams who work alongside us to develop the best equipment for our riders."
Rider's complaints about their bikes are a rarity, given the sponsorship model on which this sport operates. However, they do occasionally boil to the surface, and this example is the second occasion we've seen it this year. Fellow Frenchman, Florian Senechal sparked a similar response from his Arkea B&B Hotels team when he complained about their Bianchi bikes at the finish line of Paris-Roubaix. In the 2022 Giro d'Italia, Wilco Kelderman blamed his disc brakes for overheating and breaking his spokes, a claim that his then-sponsor Specialized quickly put to bed.
Look also suffered a pre-Tour de France headache back in 2018, when the Arkea B&B Hotels team (then Fortuneo-Samsic) ended its partnership with immediate effect, and subsequently switched to Spanish brand BH.
It's also not the first time Martin has spoken out on sensitive subjects. In 2022, he questioned whether the Tour de France should change dates due to the increasing effects of global warming, something teams were battling once again at this year's Grand Départ in Florence. He has also called for a ban on Ketones, and on multiple occasions tackled the contentious subject of doping, saying in 2020 that he "wouldn't put my hand in the fire to say the whole peloton is clean."
Martin, whose best Tour result remains his 8th place in 2021, is strongly rumoured to be leaving Cofidis at the end of 2024. His destination is fellow French team, Groupama FDJ, where he looks set to replace rising French star Lenny Martinez who is linked with a move to Bahrain Victorious.
