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…