The heat at this year's Tour de France has been hard to ignore, and just like every other aspect of the race there's an arms race between teams to keep their riders cool. Now it might seem an odd juxtaposition, keeping riders cool while they're warming up, but a rider's core temperature and the effect it has on their performance has been one of the big areas of focus in athlete performance in recent years. In fact, our latest podcast goes into great detail about that very thing with Aline Barre of CORE, who is a leading expert on the effects of heat on sporting performance.
Netcompany Ineos, back in their Team Sky days, were famous for the now overused term marginal gains, and actively pursued an advantage in all areas of performance (though many other teams would claim they did the same but they just didn't coin a snappy phrase for it), so it should be no surprise to see them take cooling very seriously.
You've probably already seen the images of the entire squad resting with their forearms submerged in cold water, which is something the GB track team has done in the past, but they also went for ice vests, ice packs, individual fans from their turbo trainer sponsor Elite and enormous industrial-sized cooling units that all worked together to keep the riders from overheating.
I was expecting similar levels of prep from the potential GC-winning teams like UAE Team Emirates-XRG, Visma-Lease a Bike and Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, and although they had plenty of individual fans, ice vests and larger fans spraying mist, they were pretty similar to the rest of the teams I saw, which I must admit came as a bit of a surprise. I was expecting the same level of prep as Netcompany Ineos, but clearly they had more pressing priorities.
It was, in fact, the Alpecin-Premier Tech squad of MvdP and Jasper Phillipsen that I thought had the next best set-up. They took what looked to me like the same system used by high-end supermarkets to keep fruit and veg cool and had it built into the awning of their team bus, and it was very impressive. At first I was curious as to why so many fans were hanging around the team bus, especially as it was only really the mechanics milling about, but once I got closer it made total sense. They had a series of pipes built into the frame of the sun shield that sprayed out a constant cloud of icy cold water, keeping not only the riders and staff cool in the 35-degree heat, but also those of us lurking around the bus. Think of how cold the grocery section is in your local Waitrose, and you get the idea; top marks to whoever from Alpecin came up with that one.
Smart trainers from Elite, Wahoo and Tacx are a common sight before the start of a TT, but here all of the riders had their fan systems too. Designed to keep you cool during smart trainer sessions, it doubles up well as another weapon in the fight to keep riders from overheating when going through their warm-up drills. The EF Education team in particular had a very dialled set up with Wahoo trainers and fans in matching pink, which I thought looked great. I'll be honest, I've never given the aesthetics of a turbo trainer any thought before, but maybe I should.
The guys from XDS Astana are all using smart trainers from Magene, but as yet they don't have a smart fan system, so they had resorted to industrial units from a company called Vacmaster. Not a brand I was aware of, but a quick Google suggests they have a cheap portable fan which looked to be doing an OK job, though all of the riders had also gone heavy with Ice packs and vests just to make sure.
Fans are good, but a device that sprays mist at the same time is even better, and there were plenty of setups on display, and all mainly industrial-looking affairs clearly on loan from their local office suppliers. To make the most of these, some of the teams keep riders pretty close to each other underneath awnings and E-Zups, firstly to shelter from the sun but also to try and trap the cooled air in and around the riders. Of all the teams I saw doing this, the Lotto-Intermarché guys seemed to have the most fun-looking atmosphere, and as you might expect for a Belgian team, they had some terrible yet strangely familiar Euro techno blaring out, the sort of thing anyone who has been to a six-day or Flemish CX race will be more than familiar with.
Bizarrely, the UCI had taken the decision to ban the long-time favourite solution for riders of stuffing ice store in tights or socks down their jerseys, as they were deemed to be giving an aero advantage, though in my mind that would surely be a moot point once they melted anyway? We've seen Ice vests before, of course, but here every rider had one on, a sign of both the high temperatures and the focus and attention to detail every rider puts into the biggest event of the year. There was also talk of special cold gloves being used by some teams, though my source couldn't confirm whether these were for warm-up or race use, or exactly how they worked, though it does go to show how seriously teams are taking the changing seasons and warmer mid-summer temperatures.
