There is much more to riding a race like the Tour de France than just turning the pedals. In the modern peloton, especially among the general classification riders, teams are looking for every possible way to get an advantage over their rivals. This means focusing on the things that happen away from the bike as well as on it. Recovery and fuelling techniques are key areas in which teams believe they can find advantages, ensuring that over a three-week race their riders get to the start line of each stage feeling as fresh as possible.
The team which engineered the marginal gains philosophy was the British squad, Ineos Grenadiers. They took the sport by storm as Team Sky from 2012 onwards, winning successive Tours de France like they were going out of fashion. Team Sky set the gold-standard when it came to ensuring that no stone was left unturned when it came to riders having everything they need to perform in a Grand Tour.
As the sport has moved on, however, other teams have caught up with the trailblazing British team, and we’re beginning to see new innovations year on year when it comes to techniques that teams are using to try and get some incremental advantages.
In 2024, for example, EF Education-EasyPost are using Eight Sleep, a smart-cooling mattress to ensure optimum recovery after every stage.
“It adjusts to your specific body temperature by learning over a few nights what your body needs in terms of temperature throughout the night,” Neilson Powless explained. “For me it helps me fall asleep and get into a deep sleep way faster than I could without because every night I go to sleep I’m just so hot from racing. We have to eat lunch at like 6:30pm and dinner at 8:30pm so you’re having massive meals, trying to replenish a day of 7000-9000 calories and your body is super hot trying to process all of that. Then we’re trying to go to bed an hour after eating all that food so I’m like a furnace every time I go to sleep at night but having the Eight Sleep when I get into bed after setting it to cool for an hour before you get in, it helps you fall asleep really quick.”
The mattress also has in-built technology to feedback to riders regarding their sleep quality, tracking whether they are in REM sleep (light sleep) or deep sleep. It can predict how long riders are awake for and if they have had a suitable amount of recovery from the efforts of the day.
It isn’t just when riders are sleeping that they are thinking about recovery, either. Processes to replenish their energy stores begin as soon as the race is finished, meaning that the role of sports nutritionists are key in Grand Tours. Visma-Lease a Bike, the team who won the last two Tours de France, believes they are at the cutting edge when it comes to planning riders nutrition.
“For each meal, each rider has a personalised plan with an app we created which does a lot of the calculations already. Each meal is tailored specifically to the needs of a rider for each single day. We have a food truck and two chefs with us and all the groceries come from our partner Jumbo so we know the nutritional values and have full control over what we are using and the quality of it. That makes it easier to plan ahead and work in detail,” Martijn Redegeld, Visma-Lease a Bike’s head of sports nutrition, explained.
“We make some input into the app, like what type of stage it is, the amount of time it will take and the average power, then it creates a nutritional plan based on algorithms and nutritional data that it has learnt. What comes out is that the riders get that plan, they see you need so many calories and carbohydrates then the chefs put the exact meals in there which match what the individual needs. The rider then comes to the buffet, opens his app and sees he needs to have 250 grams of pasta and 120 grams of chicken, for example. We have the buffet then we have scales there and they weigh everything individually.”
While teams like Visma-Lease a Bike have been working with resources and knowledge to optimise fuelling and recovery strategies for a long time, there are other WorldTour squads who are earlier in their journey when it comes to adopting the use of data to inform decisions. Lidl-Trek, for example, have employed data analysts as of this season (a decision helped by the addition of their new sponsor in Lidl) and they believe that having these additional staff members is imperative in the current era of professional racing.
“I think the biggest thing we have changed this year is analysing data about who is fresh, who is going down and who is going up. I think bringing this data analyst on board and reviewing and making understandable reports has made a big difference,” Steven de Jongh, Lidl-Trek’s lead sports director explained.
“They dive so deep into the numbers and create a whole report to give you a view of how riders are recovering, how they race, how deep they can go. That informs my decision as a sports director of who we put in the breakaway. The riders are keen to use this data and they want to understand their bodies. In the end, the rider often feels it and says it to us, and the data backs up their real feelings which makes it all easier as we have the proper scientific backing. With Lidl on board, we are growing slowly in every department, the amount of people working for the team and the staff will grow in the future while the number of riders is a fixed number.”
One of the teams with the largest number of staff members in the entire peloton still remains the Ineos Grenadiers. The British team brings a soigneur per rider to the Tour de France and Scott Drawer, the team’s Performance Director, estimates that they bring over 30 staff to the race in total.
“We have our nutritionists here for every stage with individual strategies for individual riders with preferences, every gram of it is measured so we know quantities of it and the appropriate fuelling times. All that detail is so important, our chefs are already back at the kitchen truck preparing for the stage because we know then if demands will be low or extreme. All of that work is pre done before we even get here,” Drawer explains.
Ineos are a team who bring individual mattresses, pillows, blackout blinds, air-conditioning units and dehumidifiers to every stage of the Tour. Drawer added that the team has a “hotel group” which aims to prepare the “perfect sleep environment” for each rider before arriving at each accommodation. Riders have “cool baths” after the race with the goal of bringing their core temperature down on hot days, and Drawer adds that in races like the Giro d’Italia, when the weather can be cooler on the mountains, the team implements a “cold weather protocol” whereby soigneurs have specific instructions of what clothing and drinks riders should have after the stage.
The challenge that remains for all teams when it comes to searching for marginal gains is staying ahead of the curve. For a long time, Ineos Grenadiers were at the forefront, but it’s fair to say that the likes of Visma-Lease a Bike and UAE Team Emirates have caught up in recent years. Drawer believes that his team still has an advantage over others due to the wider Ineos group that supports them, however.
“We’ve always had really good industry and academic partnerships which are critical to your ability to stay ahead of the curve. I think we’re trying to expand those and take the next step. We’re not winning at the moment and we’re going through a transitional period so science and tech is going to step up in that process,” Drawer said.
“You need good networks and connections. We can use our Ineos sport partnerships, so if we have an engineering problem we can go to Mercedes. If we want to discuss recovery we can contact the All Blacks. If we want to understand endurance science we have a really good relationship with Eliud Kipchoge’s running academy. We can share best practice among one another. We have conversations with our America’s Cup Team who are doing some smart work around blood biomarkers to look at immune stress responses to training. We need to do more and one of my motivations over the next 12-24 months is to review and reevaluate those and go bigger for the future.”
As much as the purists of the sport may resent the new role that data and science has in professional cycling, the reality is that it has become a crucial part of each rider’s success. The gaps between those at the top are so small now that teams have to look for incremental improvements wherever they can. Gone are the days of relying on fighting spirit and good legs. That still plays a part, of course, but cycling is as much of a race to keep up with technology as it is on the bike itself.
