“There’s An Intimacy To What We Do”: How Peloton Became Must-Watch TV In 2020

Source: Vanity Fair, Kenzie Bryant
Photo: Peloton

As the world (gyms included) shut down, the star instructors on the popular fitness app captured Americans’ imaginations while toning their glutes.

One day in early 2019, Robin Arzón returned home from a Whole Foods run to find that someone had Instagrammed a photo of the contents of her cart. “It was like a ‘what I eat in a day’ without my permission,” she said with a laugh during a recent phone call. “It was like, ‘This is…Robin’s cart.’ And I was like, Oh, shit, that really is my cart. I wasn’t even in the photo. That is a moment where I thought, Oh, okay, so, like, the details? People want to know all of it.”

Quarantine has produced its own slate of celebrities—various TikTok stars, Ziwe Fumudoh, Li Ziqi, Paul Mescal and his little chain. Stanley Tucci in that one video, you know which. These are the people (and things) who are helping us get through it. And a list of quarantine celebrities wouldn’t be complete without Peloton’s 33 instructors.

Arzón, who has worked for Peloton since 2014, was, like many of her colleagues, already well known to the growing in-group of Peloton users. But then 2020 came along, and all the gyms closed. Before that, the bikes were generally understood as another luxury for those who build big home gyms in their enormous glass houses (thanks in part to that viral commercial; happy one-year anniversary to it); in the last several months, though, Peloton became something a regular person could easily talk themselves into buying because it was “essential” to “survival.”

Peloton now has more than 3.6 million subscribers, and just posted a 382% growth in those who have the $12.99-per-month app, as well as a 137% spike in actual bike and/or tread owners, equipment that starts at $1,895, plus a monthly subscription of $39. And with less for all of us to do and fewer human interactions to follow, the instructors are occupying the kind of headspace that one might have reserved for more conventional celebrities.

Many Peloton instructors attract the kind of devotion those people might even envy—some live workouts see over 20,000 attendees, equivalent to a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden, except that nobody would ever wake at 6:30 a.m. for a Billy Joel concert (I don’t think).

Still, it’s hard to trace an exact celebrity cognate for them. Like influencers, they share glimpses of their lives and their tastes with those who opt to hear them. Like professional athletes, their bodies are built for performance. Like talk show hosts, they produce a running stream of commentary, so a viewer’s own thoughts don’t have to fill the void. Like DJs, they anticipate a group’s mood. Like reality stars, they live largely unscripted but still play to camera. Like performers on that MSG stage, they have incredible lung capacity. They are a new class of celebrities, beamed into the homes we can’t really leave. And they are captivating a captive audience.

The signs of growing fame are all around. In November a follower of the Deuxmoi blind-item Instagram account asked for gossip about Peloton instructors, as one might itch for blinds about some silver screen ingénue. I haven’t kept tabs on whether the account has delivered, but the curiosity is there. Ally Love and Arzón have both recounted a day in the life for The New York Times (company cofounder John Foley made waves last week with his own unorthodox contribution to the form). Cody Rigsby was recently profiled in Vogue, and Alex Toussaint at ESPN. The instructors also have devotional social followings on Reddit, Instagram, and Facebook under the general Peloton banner, but also in growing groups dedicated to individual instructors.

Amanda Mull, a writer for The Atlantic, which published her pre-pandemic feature on the brand, put it like this on Twitter recently: “I have never been big on The Celebs or influencers or youtubers or anything so I didn’t really *get* parasocial relationships. But then I got a peloton.”

As someone who has Googled “[INSTRUCTOR REDACTED] girlfriend wife” before, the light in me recognized the light in that tweet. I called up Mull to ask her to explain myself to me. “One of Peloton’s strengths is that they don’t have to hire, like, five or six or 10 new instructors for every location,” she said. “So you get a set of instructors that are probably the best spin instructors in the world, and everybody can sort of attach themselves to their favorite one or their favorite couple. It really magnifies the effect that fitness influencers, as instructors, had already sort of created for themselves on social media.”

The instructors not only have a fitness specialty—some are best known for weightlifting, running, meditation, cycling, pilates, or a combination thereof—but also their more ineffable “things.” Love is known for her spirituality, especially during her “Sundays With Love” series, in which she offers something close to a sermon from the pulpit. Rigsby leans on ’90s and ’00s nostalgia and will say almost anything to make you laugh. Arzón is a hardass who could make hustle culture flinch; Emma Lovewell, previously a dancer, is a former club queen who gets her EDM fix on the bike. There is something, or rather someone, for everyone.

Everyone gets a little sheepish when trying to explain why they go back to the well over and over. Sarah Shorthose, a photographer who works in central Illinois, told me that the general nickname for Matt Wilpers “is the ‘Baby-Faced Assassin,’ and when I first heard it, I was like, Okay, that’s weird. Now I’m like, Of course it is, because he smiles and laughs and is always positive, but he is also trying to murder you at the same time.”

Ana Lúcia Azevedo, from Framingham, Massachusetts, loves Toussaint’s taste in music and how challenging his rides are, while Rigsby is “cute” and “seems like he loves life.”

“I have the most embarrassing crush on Denis Morton,” Mull said, explaining that she never expected him to be a favorite. “But the first ride I took from him, back-to-back you got ‘Black Beatles’ and a ’90s Brooks & Dunn song. I was like, I have never felt so understood.”

Among my own favorites is Tunde Oyeneyin. During a joint Beyoncé-themed ride with Toussaint, “I Was Here” started playing, and Oyeneyin began to monologue slowly, taking her time: “My dad passed away in 2012. This song healed me. The lyrics, the words of this song, it healed me. It reminded me to acknowledge that he was here. It reminded me to acknowledge the footprint, the mark, that he made on this world, the mark that he made in his children’s lives.” I didn’t think it was possible to shed tears during a workout because of all those endorphins I kept hearing about, but there’s no denying it. I cried.

I recently spoke to a handful of the instructors, including Oyeneyin, about what makes them good at what they do and how they balance their pandemic lives with their still-growing fame. Oyeneyin told me that Rigsby recruited her by sending her an Instagram message, which she thought was fake until she saw the blue check mark. Her tryout was devastating; she didn’t make it the first time around. To her that felt like another tragedy, which she knows a lot about. Her younger brother died in 2009, her father three years after that, and her mother three years after that. “Outside of those three deaths, those three horrible, horrible, horrible losses, hearing this ‘no’ was the worst feeling.” Rigsby contacted her again eight months later, and Oyeneyin “made sure the second time they couldn’t say no.”

She’s a total light, dancing while making riders climb enormous hills. With her, you get the personal self-help vibe that instructors tap into to varying degrees, but she’s capable of addressing larger systemic issues from the bike as well. After George Floyd’s killing in May, the company asked if she wanted to say something during a class, and she did through what was named the “Speak Up” series. There were 19,000 members who took the first class live, and more than 115,000 have taken it since. It’s possible every single one DM’d her afterward. She got through about 10% of those messages from June. Some told her that she was the first Black person to come inside their home, via the bike; others said that they had always scrolled past her face when choosing their workouts and now regretted that.

“I wanted people who felt that way to look inward. My class is a 20-minute commitment,” she told me. “If you’re unwilling to invest 20 minutes in me because we look different, then if you are a person of power, perhaps you’ve also scrolled past a candidate that’s applying for a job based on the way they look.”

Chelsea Jackson Roberts, a yoga and meditation instructor, came to Peloton in the spring with a Ph.D. in educational studies and experience as a Lululemon ambassador, not to mention a significant social media following (which has since doubled). She joined the “Speak Up” series as well.

“One of the things about yoga is that you don’t want to feed the ego,” she said. “You don’t want to do all of these things that are about fame. And what I noticed, though, was that actually I do want to be recognized. I actually do want to be acknowledged, because each time I’m recognized and acknowledged, there may be another Black girl or Black woman who says, wow, I can do this too.”

She, too, has had to adjust to her new exposure. “Like, for my mom to go on to Instagram Live and just see me chatting with Jennifer Garner, like, just like it’s normal,” she said, referring to a wellness series she does with the actor. “Like, that’s when I was like, Oh, Chelsea, this is real.”

The instructors’ occasional cross-pollination with more traditional celebrities has also raised their profiles. One of the company’s most notable instructors, Alex Toussaint, is a gravitational force for athletes to the bike. Last summer, New England Patriots quarterback Cam Newton came to New York to ride in-studio with him; Alex Rodriguez follows him on Instagram; and earlier this year, several professional golfers competed against each other in his class.

Part of the draw, besides his energy and the challenge his rides offer, is that they speak the same language. Like a teammate at the postgame presser or a coach you’ve had on some team sport at some point in your life, Toussaint returns often to his tried-and-true sayings. “Like, I try to express to people, like, fail now, fail fast, fail, fail forward, because that’s how you grow,” he told me. “I understand that, like, my entire life, I was so scared to fail, so I never tried. And I’m understanding now in life that, like, it’s the failure that helps you be great. So I need you to try.”

And then there’s Rigsby, another fan favorite, and one who considers himself in “the Comedy Central lane, if you will.” Many of the riders I spoke with volunteered that they take a class with Rigsby when they want to be entertained as much as they want to workout. His purpose, he said, is to be something of a clown “so that people recognize that shame and fear and regret are the things that are holding them back. If I can laugh at myself, you can not take this ride so seriously, and we can have a good giggle about it together.” In a post-Thanksgiving bootcamp ride, he did a tight 60 seconds about cycling away from “the family friend who puts raisins in things”; I had to take a second to regain composure.

Rigsby, along with Arzón and others, is responsible for bringing on several of the instructors who now have their own platforms. “It used to be kind of us just scouring through social media and trying to find raw talent. And now it’s kind of a much bigger production because we’re such a bigger company where we have casting agents,” he said before correcting himself with “talent-recruitment people.” Arzón added that she looks for people who want more than just to be in front of the camera. “This isn’t a gig. This isn’t a six-month movie contract, you know? This is something that is much more of a marriage; there’s an intimacy to what we do, being in people’s homes.

“We don’t need clones,” she continued. “We don’t need a clone of Cody or a clone of Ally. I know it’s so annoying when, like, a Hollywood agent says, ‘You know it when you see it…’ [But] you really do know it when you see it.”

The Peloton universe, like Marvel or E! or even the old studio system before them, has built its talent from within. Arzón, one of its first, has probably set the precedent. She’s pregnant now, and prenatal routines are a part of her repertoire. But Us Weekly didn’t get the exclusive announcement, and neither did her own Instagram. Peloton did.

Recalling that Whole Foods cart incident, she had to make a decision with her husband about how and how much to share. She broke the news during a live class in September, in another highly produced segment beamed live to her thousands of viewers. With one hand reaching out to the camera as if to try and hold the hand of whoever was on the other side. “So if anyone ever doubts that this is more than a bike, I would invite them to look again.” With that, a new story line began.

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/12/how-peloton-became-must-watch-tv-in-2020