Crosswinds on the slides, insidious showers, ambush attempts, discomfort and battle, the peloton descends south towards the Pyrenees like an arrow through the lands of Armagnac and D’Artagnan, Nogaro, Luis Ocaña territory. Beautiful land of light and temperate fruit trees for the exile who arrived from the darkness of the Aran valleys, land of skirmishes and Homeric attacks for the disarming UAE, which infiltrates Adam Yates into a group of 21 high-calibre escapees – Mathieu van der Poel, Oier Lazkano, Arnaud de Lie, Jonas Abrahamsen with polka dots, Rui Cosa, among them – behind whom the Vismas, the Soudal, the Ineos fly alarmed. Everyone fears that Yates, Pogacar’s lieutenant, already third in the last Tour, and 6m 59s behind in the general classification, will get back in front. It takes them 96 kilometres at 50 km/h to put out the fire, and not content, five kilometres later they join forces with the wind and organise fans. The day is non-stop until the sprint in Pau, where Jasper Philipsen achieves his second victory.
Behind him is Juan Ayuso, with Covid, who retired at kilometre 30 of the 13th stage of the Tour of his debut, so much preparation, so many ambitions, so much nothing. Neither does Primoz Roglic, condemned to fill the statistical box of fallen, injured and retired favourites every year, who, to find hope in his complicated relationship with the Tour, could look in the mirror of the Cuenca native of Mont de Marsan, who in his first Tour, in 1969, fell the day that Eddy Merckx wore yellow for the first time in his life and broke his mouth. Two years later he fell when he had defeated Merckx, and was left without the Tour of 1971. He also abandoned the Tour of 1972 due to a fall. Finally, fate, which seemed black and unbeatable, was defeated by the stubbornness of the cyclist from Priego in 1973.
Where Armagnac grows, foie grows, which must be eaten, like that which comes from the goose livers that the son of the champion Jean Louis Ocaña fattens up in those lands, the son of the champion, condensed with fat that perhaps, nothing is written, will end up forming part of the daily menu of cyclists, they need so many calories, so much energy, for their phenomenal engines to produce the watts that melt the asphalt in their path.
Old-school cycling, diesel-powered climbers, tough on anything, no change of pace, is dead. Welcome to the new cycling. Explosive climbers with sprinter power. Time trialists who accelerate at every turn. It’s not just about watts anymore, but also about calories, the new inhuman face of cycling. Riders stuffed with carbohydrates to keep their muscles working at full speed.
In Friday’s Agen-Pau, which is not the one that requires the least words to express itself in the history of the Tour (there is a Nay-Pau, a time trial in 1981 won by Hinault) the cyclists needed, more or less, to produce 4.7 watts per kilo by moving their legs for almost four hours. That means an energy requirement, according to calculations published in X by Aitor Viribay, physiologist of Ineos, of more or less 20 calories per minute, 1,200 per hour. 60% comes from the carbohydrates they eat. They need to process almost three grams per minute. “To generate 300 or 400 watts to move the pedals, the body has to produce 2,000,” says Viribay. “1,600 are dispersed in heat. Producing a watt is very expensive in terms of energy. And on the roadsides, assistants who have to adjust their logistics to be at various points during the stage, feed them with up to 150 grams of food per hour. “Energy is becoming a problem. It is no longer a question of how to manage it, but of the fact that it will be lacking. Strategies must be focused on that. Before, it could be managed in another way. Before, it was more about efficiency, submaximal intensities, how can I be more efficient. Today, that is not enough, because there is energy expenditure every day,” explains Viribay. “The equation changes in some way: to increase relative watts, increase absolute watts, don’t lose weight. Everything is taken with a grain of salt, obviously. In the Galibier we look at the relative watt, but what the light climber suffers so many days on the flat or windy, the expense that stress entails, until reaching the mountain, is much more.”
If the exaggerated breakaway with Adam Yates – 96 kilometres at 50 per hour – was perhaps not the best training for the two days of the weekend – Tourmalet and Pla d’Adet on Saturday; Peyresourde, Menté, Portet d’Aspet, Agnes and the demonic Plateau de Beille on Sunday: 350 kilometres and 8,800 metres of accumulated positive gradient between the two – in which the Pyrenees will burn, it was a good workout for his digestive system. Although Pogacar maintains that he is stronger than ever and that if he could not beat Vingegaard on Wednesday in Lioran it was because the Dane, strangely and surprisingly, is in the best shape of his life, the explanation offered by the experts of physiology is that the Slovenian did not eat enough and ran out of energy at the end. And Pogacar, with his 67 kilos, and the speed with which he climbs and his unbeatable change of pace on slopes, is the model of the modern cyclist. There are cyclists like Evenepoel who barely eat, and he has lost three kilos in search of greater climbing efficiency. They are old school, who will have a hard time adapting to new habits. “The digestive system is something very plastic. If you are not giving it the need to work and absorb, it compresses. When you do intermittent fasting, for example, the stomach compresses and the food capacity, the food limit, goes down,” explains Viribay. “When a cyclist is constantly exposed to energy restriction, it not only affects him at a peripheral, muscular level, but he will not be prepared to absorb the calories needed in the Tour.”
Wearing the red polka dots of the king of the mountains, tied on points with Tadej Pogacar, there is a Norwegian named Jonas Abrahamsen, a big cyclist who weighs almost 80 kilos and makes purists frown. A fat climber? What is that? He is not a mirage, a rarity, as many claim, but a sign of the future that is already here. Deep down, Abrahamsen, who a couple of years ago, obsessed with the scales like every self-respecting cyclist, weighed 20 kilos less, is nothing but a herald of what is to come, a pioneer. “When I weighed 60 kilos I had no energy,” confessed the 28-year-old Norwegian in a statement. The Team. “I ate so little that my body slowly shut down.”
“That’s it, that’s it,” Viribay agrees vigorously, because the colossal Norwegian is in a way the embodiment of his ideas, which in a way mean the end of the myth that to climb better you have to weigh less. “From a 7% gradient, weight is always going to play an important role. The thing is that the watts of the cyclists are increasing so much that weight is not so penalized. A person like Tadej, who weighs 67, can reach seven watts per kilo in a 20-minute climb, just like a 54-weight Nairo. And in many of the stages, like yesterday, with so much explosiveness, the absolute watt rules, because today the gap between the kilo watt and the absolute watt is closing.”
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