COLD WARS

As the Tour de France winds its way through sweltering central France, Chris Marshall-Bell explores the new frontiers of pro-level performance Are

-  Chris Marshall-Bell

It was during a scorching hot stage 10 of the Tour de France last week that Jasper Stuyven noticed that his legs were sapped, his energy depleted.

“I looked at my computer and it said my temperature was 41°C. I had never seen that before,” the Lidl-Trek man tells Cycling Weekly. “I had just completely blown up after twice trying to follow attacks and I felt really quite overheated but I didn’t expect my temperature to be so high. Normally on hot days you stay around 38 to 38.5°C. I didn’t feel so good, to be honest.”

Combating heat has become cycling’s new frontier, with cooling strategies taking on as much importance as finely tuned preparation, stage recons and riding on the rollers before and after the stage.

“I immediately drank water and poured it on myself, grabbed a lot of ice, ate an ice gel and hoped for the best,” Stuyven adds. In the end, he survived the day, recovering well enough to win the peloton’s sprint for 11th place.

In the past few years, particularly post-pandemic, cycling has ramped up its focus on keeping riders cool in the hot summer months, specifically at the Tour de France, where it’s not uncommon for the mercury to be in the mid-30s on successive days.

Sophie Roullois is a soigneur at EF Education-EasyPost. “It’s all about ice,” she says. “Ice is the new fashion in cycling.” Why? “Because it’s hotter now than it ever has been – the climate has changed a little bit. But also we now have science telling us in more precise detail that we have to cool the body down if we want to make sure we can perform, and especially at the Tour, where riders are racing for 21 days and need to maximise everything.”