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Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#91

Post by bell-cot »

NoPicklez wrote: post #5
bell-cot wrote: post #2

> Not so long ago, the professional cycling world's approach to fuelling was remarkably basic. [...] > These days, it is an entirely different prospect, with vast sums spent on custom-built food trucks, personalised nutrition apps and meticulously planned meal regimes all in the name of performance enhancement. > For the nutritionists and chefs tasked with providing sustenance to power their team's riders over 2,170…

It's not a sport of the 0.0001% when anybody can go buy a bike and ride. At the top level of any sport and in the top race or competition of that sport, it is going to represent the pinnacle of that sport.

From a quick skim here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_teams_and_cyclists_in_... - all but one team are from well-to-do Western countries, or rich Gulf States. Cyclists seem similarly all-but-a-few white.

Anyone can learn a bunch of gymnastic moves, too. But last I heard, "Olympic Gymnast" implies a >1k hour/year training regimen, starting at an extremely young age.

Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#92

Post by matsemann »

wiether wrote: post #49
mesofile wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I follow cycling casually but I'm racking my brain trying to think of who 'EDB' refers to.

Same, I can't find anyone close to it.

Sorry, it was an autocorrect by my phone. EDB means Elektronisk Data Behandling, which is an archaic Norwegian way of writing computers, lol..

I meant to write EBH, Edvald Boasson-Hagen. I probably should've spelled it out, but the Velochef book is by the Team Sky chef, the team of EBH.

Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#93

Post by toast0 »

n4r9 wrote: post #77
NoPicklez wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The performance difference between cheaper bikes and top end bikes won’t make the difference in being a successful cyclist. Anyone can pick up a bike and start training and racing in competitions and be talent scouted in the same way that you would in football, it’s what happens here in Australia. Yes a football is cheaper than a bike, but it’s not 0.0001% type stuff like Formula 1. Where you legitimately need to pay…

Is $2000 really "cheap" though? I personally would need to use a cycle to work scheme, and I consider myself pretty well off. I know people on lower incomes who would find that very off-putting as a barrier to entry. I think you'd need to go to the $150 or less range to be appealing to people in that situation.

$2000 is not bad looking at what it costs to play hockey. A lot of sports are less expensive though.

Otoh, around me, $100 gets you a circa 1980 road bike off craigslist. That'll do fine. I'm seeing a much more recent road bike for $500, if you don't like old stuff because it's old. Plenty of more expensive stuff too. I like the early 1980s bikes because road bikes were in fashion and there were a lot of makes competing and quality (of surviving bikes) is pretty good. Later, mountain bikes started trending, there was consolidation and I don't feel that those bikes are as good on the road as a general rule.

Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#94

Post by matsemann »

nradov wrote: post #82
WXLCKNO wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At 250w average during a 5 hour ride I'm burning like 1000 calories per hour or something mething close. Glycogen reserves are 2000 calories from a quick Google search, so that's 3k calories I need to make up for or 600 per hour. I'm sure there's a bunch of stuff I'm missing but 400 definitely makes more sense than 200

What you're missing is fat metabolism. If you're metabolically healthy (which you must be if you can hold 250W for hours) then you can make up the difference by converting stored fat into glycogen.

Yup, part of my long distance cycle training was somewhat getting "fat adapted".

Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#95

Post by matsemann »

prmoustache wrote: post #55
davidw wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, some of the modern nutrition stuff like gels work really well. I did a 115 mile road bike ride on Sunday and kept eating gels and... I'm not going to say I was super fresh or anything by the end of that, but I was still feeling pretty good.

There is usually a point where you can't get those gel inside. It is nice to mix with other stuff.

After my longest ever bike ride, 300 km, I didn't touch a gel for years, heh. Got so sick of 3+ gels per hour for those ~8 hours.

Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#96

Post by WXLCKNO »

nradov wrote: post #82
WXLCKNO wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At 250w average during a 5 hour ride I'm burning like 1000 calories per hour or something mething close. Glycogen reserves are 2000 calories from a quick Google search, so that's 3k calories I need to make up for or 600 per hour. I'm sure there's a bunch of stuff I'm missing but 400 definitely makes more sense than 200

What you're missing is fat metabolism. If you're metabolically healthy (which you must be if you can hold 250W for hours) then you can make up the difference by converting stored fat into glycogen.

Right! That was a big missing chunk :)

Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#97

Post by matsemann »

bell-cot wrote: post #88
wasmitnetzen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A UCI WorldTeam has a budget of about 10 to 60 million euros. That's peanuts in a lot of other sports.

If that budget is for an 8-man team, in a sport with a 3 1/2-week season... An (American) NFL team has 53 "active" players (plus a practice squad, plus ...), and plays a 5-month season. And has a lot of "maintain a major stadium"-type expenses, which (my guess) cycling teams don't have. Based on your figures, and trying to scale... no , the cycling team budgets really aren't peanuts by comparison. NFL Data: https://s…

It's clear you don't know much about cycling. A pro team often consists of ~30 riders, and then 8~12 of them are selected for various races during the year. And similarly, that's the main team and they have development teams on the second level, junior teams, women teams etc

The season is longer than tour de france, that's just the most prestigious tour. There are other tours and other races. It's about 8 months long.

And I don't really think how long the season is has any relevance. You still train and need your apparatus whole year round.

The stadium stuff also doesn't really work in the favor of nfl. A pro team makes no money on tickets or concessions, and has to travel the world with their gear instead of a few states away.

Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#99

Post by ydant »

durkie wrote: post #65
matsemann wrote: post #11

I'm a bit sad that a topic I find so interesting mostly gathers knee-jerk reactions here on HN. Yes, doping, blah blah we get it. But the logistics of TdF is insane. With a new city every day, things need to move fast and preparations start early. For instance Uno-X team has a small trailer with 800 kgs of ice they travel around with, after having trouble sourcing enough ice in the small villages they stay at. Actual…

reminds me of an anecdote from Le Ride ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ride ) that talks about in one of the early Tours de France, a rider was disqualified because he broke his crank, hobbled to a nearby town, found the blacksmith, and the rider welded his own crank back together, but the blacksmith's son operated the bellows and this was seen as too much external assistance.

Looks to be this rider - Eugène Christophe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Christophe

Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#100

Post by jerlam »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #44
gosub100 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And to me, there's a distinction between taking a drug that increases availability of red blood cells vs taking steroids or meth.

What's the distinction? What about taking something when you have a cold, or nutritional supplements? It seems weird to draw an arbitrary line between things that make a body perform by stimulating natural production vs directly using synthetics.

Seconded, there is no clear line between banned drugs that help you cheat and drugs that fix medical conditions. There are drugs that are allowed if you have a doctor's note, and there are drugs that you can use only up to a certain amount.

Asthma meds for cycling, some of which are steroids, are one of the more popular examples:

https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/latest-news/the-truth-abo...

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