The Tour de France peloton is taming the world’s greatest cycling race in speeds never seen before even in its darkest doping days. But how?
Words James Witts
Jumbo-Visma’s Jonas Vingegaard won his second successive maillot jaune after completing the 3,406km of the 21-stage race at an average speed of 41.12kph. His victories were two of the fastest three on record. And that’s no outlier as, according to Procyclingstats.com, it’s a trend, with the race steadily speeding up. Inevitably, Vingegaard faced some tough questions at this year’s race. “Are you cheating?” asked one journalist after stage 17. “I don’t take anything I wouldn’t give to my daughter,” the Dane responded, “and I would definitely not give her drugs.” So parking the healthy
scepticism to one side, what are the reasons behind speeds that are greater than when Lance Armstrong was racing?
01 Power carb The role of nutrition
“For me, on-the-bike nutrition has been the greatest evolution since I started racing,” says 32-year-old Australian Luke Durbridge, who’s raced for Team Jayco-AlUla since their foundation in 2012 and completed his seventh Tour in July. “In the past, we consumed 60g of carbohydrate an hour. Now, we’re edging toward 120g as we’ve trained our gut. That’s a big difference and really impacts your performance.”
During most Tour stages, time trials aside, riders fuel their muscles via oxygen breaking down slow-burning fat. When intensity rises, instant energy is needed. Cue a greater shift to carbohydrates. But the body can only store around 500g of carbs (as glycogen), or about 2,000 calories. It needs a top-up, which is where gels, energy drinks, blocks and bars come in. The problem is, there’s a limit to what you can absorb without causing gut distress. In the past, that was deemed around 60g of carbohydrates via glucose. Then leading nutrition expert Asker Jeukendrup discovered that this theoretically could rise to 90g an hour via the addition of fructose as it’s transported across the intestine via a different channel, so there’s no sugar ‘traffic jam’.
Now, through constant grazing, this ceiling has been raised to 120g carbs an hour. Two mooted reasons are adaptations related to stomach emptying and upregulation of the expression transporters that shuttle sugar molecules into intestinal cells. Either way, over a six-hour ride,
that’s an extra 360g c
