How do pros pee during a race, anyway? (Bottle-free edition)

If you’ve been following the Giro d’Italia, you may have noticed some weird developments in the world of bathroom breaks. The race jury probably didn’t expect “please stop peeing in your bottles” to become an official race issue.

Visma-Lease a Bike’s Victor Campenaerts finally came clean about why he has made his water bottles a biohazard, on occasion, if you’re curious:

But the strange warning has is a rone of cycling’s oldest and weirdest questions: how do riders actually go to the bathroom during a race? (Sans bidon, that is.)

A deep dive into the ‘icky bottle’ phenomenon at the Giro

In the world of professional cycling, managing bathroom breaks mid-race is a crucial skill that riders must master. NSN Cycling’s Pier-André Côté and former pro Lex Albrecht share their insights on handling this challenge efficiently. There are two options for male cyclists–stopping at the side of the road, or going on the fly. With female cyclists, it is the former…mostly.

For Côté , timing is crucial if you are stopping.

“When’s the best time? I’d say there’s the obvious one: when the teams control the race or just letting the breakaway go. You obviously don’t wanna go before the breakaway goes,” he says. And then an obvious time is once they allow the gap to build up. Usually, we ride pretty easy. It’s less and less common these days to give them a big gap, but usually, you still get three or four minutes of easy riding.”

Early on in the race, the neutral zone is also a safe spot to pull off.

“You’re not supposed to start the race unless everyone is back in the main bunch. So when you’ve got longer neutrals, you can always stop. But normally if you didn’t need to go in the bus five minutes before the race, there’s no reason for you to need to go in the neutral. And then, yeah, you gotta pick your times, use the momentum as well try to do on top of climbs when the pace is fairly controlled, just keeping the break at bay,” the former national champ adds.

Côté says you learn how to”feel” the race. Tops of climbs are usually a good time, because it’s the slowest the pack will be riding.

“Then you don’t shave as much speed to stop on top. And usually the descent right after it helps you get back to speed,” he says. “You can use the cars more efficiently, the faster you go, the more draft you get. So it’s a good, good spot to come back. You don’t wanna be coming back in an uphill…