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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

#231

Post by wiether »

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.

Eugene Christophe' story is actually a meme for French fans because almost every year on French TV, the History guy will tell the story.

No matter what happen and where the race goes.

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

#232

Post by WalterBright »

hinkley wrote: post #220
nradov wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That only works on the flat stages. A small difference in power to weight ratio makes a huge difference in finishing times on the mountain stages where drafting is less of a factor.

And then there’s Pidcock who has the reflexes of a fighter pilot and can scream down the hills at speeds that would make you blanch.

I'm not sure their reflexes are better. It's more like they're the master of the feel and minutia of the airplane. They're also masters of managing the energy of their airplane, constantly trading off between altitude and speed. John Boyd was a fantastic example of that. There's a fascinating biography of him, "Boyd".

https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/031...

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

#233

Post by tpm »

bluGill wrote: post #162
scheme271 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat. UCI has a minumum weight (6.8kg) for bikes and often teams have to add weights to their bikes to hit the minimum limit. You easily get lighter bikes but your bike needs to be 6.8kg to be race legal. It certainly limits how many bits and bobs on the bike get switched over to using titanium or carbon fiber.

I'm not that deep into racing, but I'll guess that teams still want to be way under that weight so they can strategically place weight where they want it.

They may want it, but the technology only recently converged to the point where you can have an aerodynamically optimized bike under the limit weight. Before that there were special lightweight ones for the mountain stages and heavier but aerodynamically faster ones for the flatter stages. Most teams still got these two, plus of course another bike for time trial, because time trial stages are not mass start and the bikes and rider positions can be even faster and less safe there.

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

#234

Post by tpm »

pandaman wrote: post #181
bluGill wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the top level - which is pretty much the definition of a tour winner - grams make the difference between a win and loss, so of course they will not be riding steel. I'm not at top level and never will be. If I want to go faster there are many things I can do that are more effective than playing what my bike is made out of.

You can make a steel frame bike which will be lighter than the UCI weight limit with modern technology. It's just nobody cares to make one because the "unracer" crowd who believe steel frames are magic, won't be spending a couple grand on a light steel frameset and the actual racers are fine with the carbon frames, where it's much easier to control properties of different parts of the frame through fiber layout.

That's not really true, if you can make a ultralight full-featured steel-framed bike there will be buyers. There is a not so small crowd of "weight weenies" and/or steel frame fans willing to spend big.

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

#235

Post by ruszki »

hinkley wrote: post #221
ruszki wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They count it as gram per hour. If I remember well, pro cyclists can absorb 2-2.5 times as much carbohydrate in an hour than beginners.

I wonder how much of that is adaptive and how much selective. Does your body learn to absorb more, or do you have to have a high absorptivity to make it as a pro.

Both. So they adapted themselves to it, they didn’t born like that. It’s an intentional procedure. However, not everybody can handle that.

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

#236

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

vgt wrote: post #146
fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are multiple kinds of carbohydrate and the differences can matter. Gatorade’s ingredients list shows sucrose (glucose+fructose) and dextrose (glucose). Maltodextrin is isotonic in a 6x stronger solution than fructose and glucose. This means you need to drink meaningfully less water during a race to digest maltodextrin. So do we want all maltodextrin? Nope! Fructose can be absorbed by a separate pathway, which i…

Powdered sugar is 50/50 fructose and glucose, a close to perfect ratio for absorption. A dash of Gatorade powder for taste and you got yourself a drink that's inexpensive and gets you all the carbs you need.

Tour de France teams don’t care about the cost savings from cheaper sugar, they do care about the time and weight effects of drinking more water to absorb the glucose.

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

#237

Post by matsemann »

dyauspitr wrote: post #222
matsemann wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an app where you have to give your whereabouts for one hour every day. If you don't fill it in or are unavailable at the location for that hour, you get a strike. Three strikes in a set period and you will get a ban as if you had been doping. One problem with the system is that it relies on countries being strict with their athletes, which they aren't incentivized to do. Also, it's easy to "be available" but…

I didn’t understand this. You have to show up at a location once a day and stay there for an hour?

No, you have to give your location for an hour each day where you know you'll be. Like "on monday you can find me at the gym 12-13", or "Tuesday I'll be at the hotel room 18-19". And then you have to be at those locations.

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

#238

Post by [deleted] »

matsemann wrote: post #237
dyauspitr wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t understand this. You have to show up at a location once a day and stay there for an hour?

No, you have to give your location for an hour each day where you know you'll be. Like "on monday you can find me at the gym 12-13", or "Tuesday I'll be at the hotel room 18-19". And then you have to be at those locations.

[deleted]

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

#239

Post by MezzoDelCammin »

hinkley wrote: post #108
frereubu wrote: post #34

The part about not eating too much fibre because it irritates the gut reminded me of an amusing anecdote in Dan Martin's autobiography, where he talked about coming (I think) third in The Tour and was sitting with Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas from Team Sky (now Ineos Grenadiers) after the finish in Paris. He was looking forward to a big burger and chips, and Froome and Thomas were discussing how they were really l…

Runners also warn about high fiber being bad. I keep being drawn back to our friend the Banana. I think pectin is easier on the stomach than insoluble fiber, but I have a lot of gaps in this part of my knowledge. The cheeseburger calls to us all. Some of us are just "better" at resisting the call.

there's always the good old meme pic of people riding a $10k+ S-Works bike with a $.20 stale banana sticking out of a rear pocket of their jersey

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

#240

Post by bell-cot »

roelschroeven wrote: post #107
bell-cot wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Cycling teams have all kinds of expenses too. True, they don't have to maintain a major stadium. But hey do have cars to assist the riders with food, drinks, spare tires, spare bikes if needed (sometimes mu…

> I don't know how that compares...

The financial part of the report I linked shows the NFL team spending $40M/year on their stadium & other facilities. And similar-ish amounts in several other non-player-compensation expense categories.

(Yes, I wish that report's financials were far more detailed.)

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