It becomes quiet in the feeding zone as the peloton approaches on a slightly sloping road. The caretakers of the cycling teams, each with three or four bags with cooled drinks and food around their shoulders, were chatting relaxed with each other. Now they are concentrated on the right side of the road. One food bag dangles in their outstretched right hand, the left hand clasps the handles of the other bags.
Camiel Aldershof, team doctor of the Dutch Team DSM, sees ‘his’ first rider emerging from the peloton. Because the road rises slightly, his speed is not too high and he takes the bag smoothly. Aldershof immediately brings the next bag from left to right hand. Within ten seconds he and his colleague, fifty meters away, are ‘loose’ and seven food bags are hanging around the necks of as many DSM riders.
Always an exciting moment, says Aldershof. ‘Sometimes, if there’s no other option, we have to hand out when they come by at 60 kilometers per hour. That’s really dangerous.’
frozen gels
In every Tour stage, including this fourteenth, Saturday from Saint-Étienne to Mende, a part of the route is closed to the public for a safe transfer of the bags. Elsewhere on the route, bottles can be handed out everywhere on hot days like now. Frozen gels or stockings with ice cubes are often attached to the bottles with an elastic.
Sports drink-sponsored arches with ‘Ravitaillement début’ and ‘Ravitaillement fin’ mark the beginning and end of the approximately 400-metre long supply lane after 89 kilometers of course and 100 to go. Before and after the zone, the riders may throw away anything that is not to their liking, such as water bottles, bars, sugary sweet sports gel. The children of the town south of Le Puy-en-Velay pick up everything.
What DSM puts in the food bags is the result of an algorithm, says Lieke Dommerholt, former top volleyball player, now the sports dietician of the cycling team. ‘We have collected a great deal of data from every rider and rider of Team DSM over the years. Think of the number of hours of sleep, stress level, lactate level, heart rate, weight of course and the wattage that he or she pedals under different circumstances.’ Data analysts are using an algorithm that has been developed jointly with main sponsor DSM – the chemical group that is placing more and more emphasis on health and nutrition.
What emerges is what Dommerholt calls personalized nutrition. In other words, individual insight into what each rider needs in terms of nutrition. In winter, during a training camp, for a one-day classic and for the biggest race of all, the Tour de France.
Handy snap button
The road from the feeding zone may run uphill, but the speed with which the seven DSM riders still on course pass offers team doctor Aldershof insufficient time to consult an administration of the individual preferences. ‘Personalized nutrition’ is mainly related to the race. All bags therefore contain the same: a bottle with only isotonic sports drink and one, marked with a line on top, with proteins added to it. ‘That is so that riders can recover during the race,’ explains Dommerholt. “For a Grand Tour that is extremely important, because they have to deliver another performance the next day.”
The bag also contains a rice cake with a handy press stud, a fruit bar, a chocolate flavored bar, a squeezable packaging with energy gel, a small can of cola and, indispensable on the hot days this Tour, ice tights: ice cubes in a stocking to put in the fridge. lay neck. ‘Although the effect is the same as a gel, we prefer a bar,’ says Dommerholt. ‘It contains fibres, proteins and it is more filling for the stomach. It is difficult to sustain only liquid food all day long.’
sticky stuff
Many riders in the Tour have pasted a list on their handlebars to remind them to eat and drink the many kilometers. A form of low-tech that makes DSM dietician Dommerholt chuckle. ‘That’s what we did years ago.’ According to her, the riders of the team now know almost intuitively when to take something. ‘Getting enough carbohydrates is the most important,’ says the sports dietitian. ‘That is the fuel for the engine of the body, but that fuel runs out quickly, so you have to top it up in time, otherwise you will run into the man with the hammer.’
The iron rule is 90 grams of carbohydrates per hour. ‘We have practiced so much with that that it is not necessary to warn the riders via the bicycle computer. That 90-per-hour is in their system.’ The packaging of the endurance bar with chocolate flavor states 30 grams of carbohydrates of which 14 grams of sugar. The largest part of the 90 grams must therefore come from the water bottle. ‘But on these hot days’, explains sports doctor Aldershof, ‘we do half less, because the riders drink a lot more.’
What DSM has not opted for, in contrast to many other teams, is to fill bottles with only water these days. Not for drinking, but so that the rider can spray himself coolingly wet. That risk is too great for Aldershof. There is a danger that riders in the hectic pace of a Tour stage, distracted by heat and fatigue, will pour a full bottle of energy drink over their heads. “You really don’t want that, that sticky stuff all over you.”