A Different Level

Is the professional peloton getting faster, and if so, why?

Yes.

The Monuments are rewriting the record books and making us rethink how fast 250km+bike races can be ridden. The first three Monuments of 2024 set records for average speed. RVV and RBX broke the record which was set last year. MSR broke a 30+year old record. Multiple spring classics also set speed records this year, some by huge margins.

The climbing times continue to get faster on almost every hill and mountain in Europe.

There have been too many climbing records this year alone to list, but some of the most prestigious to go down are the Poggio in MSR (by Tadej Pogacar and Mathieu van der Poel) and La Redoute in LBL (by Pogi), both of which only broke a record that had been set the year before.

The only records that have not been broken in the past few seasons are the mythical climbing speeds by riders like Marco Pantani, of the EPO-era late 1990s and early 2000s. And Jonas Vingegaard was approaching that level last year (Pogacar appears to be approaching it this year, but he is not quite as strong on long climbs).

The obvious question is why, and how, if not for doping, is almost everybody riding so much faster than they were in the 2010s?

The conventional answers are better training programs, recovery practices, nutrition on and off the bike, understanding and utilization of altitude protocols, more targeted approaches to the racing schedule, better equipment, and perhaps slightly more talented riders entering the professional peloton.

I’ll play devil’s advocate for a while, because most of these seemingly plausible explanations have major flaws.

I have yet to see anybody give any evidence for how training programs are better now than they were five or ten years ago, when Team Sky/INEOS and Chris Froome had a stranglehold on the Tour de France at a shade above 6 watts per kilogram for 20ish minutes (the number is now closer to 7, a more than a 10 percent increase in performance). Riders are still riding their bikes a lot of hours per week and they’re still doing structured workouts to their power meters and heart rate monitors.

Nor is there a single specific example of “recovery” being more scientific than it was then, when for example, Romain Bardet, who has never pushed 7 w/kg for any duration (I’m being facetious, but still) got second place in the Tour. Bike riders spend most of their days in bed and sleep a lot to rest their legs. It’s pretty simple.

I will grant that the main recent breakthrough in cycling nutrition is carbohydrate intake during exercise, which has gone from less than 50 grams per hour up to 120 for some athletes. If this actually works, this would explain most of the better “fatigue resistance” AKA ability to climb (or sprint) at record speeds at the end of a long, hard day, in the contemporary peloton. If glycogen depletion was a problem until the new era of 120g/hr, then surely now the riders should arrive at the finale of a race with a full gas tank, as opposed to the past when they were running close to empty.

Logically, this makes sense. Empirically, it makes almost none. The races were just as long and difficult, if not longer and with more climbing, in the 1990s and early 2000s as they are now. Yet riders like Marco Pantani had no trouble doing record watts/kg numbers after 200km+ mountain stages and often 4,000+ kilojuoles. Obviously, there is the doping factor to consider there, but I don’t think glygocen stores care about your hematocrit number or red blood cell count. So while I buy that perhaps tripling carbohydrate intake during exercise could make a 1-3 percent difference in climbing performance, especially at the end of a monster day, it is not going to explain the entire massive increase in level in the entire peloton in just a few years.

I know very little about the physiological effects of altitude training, but I did do it myself on and off for a few years as a runner. There are different intellectual camps in physiology regarding altitude, especially whether it improves an endurance athlete’s performance at sea level. I did a VO2 max test at altitude with a researcher at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs who was fairly adamant that there was no scientific evidence for altitude training being beneficial for a sea level athletes. Of course, some cycling races have some altitude at the top of mountains, and there is certainly evidence for altitude training improving altitude performance. I will say that the riders seem to be flying specifically at the top portion of climbs the last few years, and doing huge watts even in the thinner air (I’m aware the air isn’t actually thinner at altitude, I say that as a way of simplifying the discussion). So perhaps the acclimation is better than it used to be.

All of that being said, I do not believe there has been an advance in altitude protocols for many riders these days. I do not buy it as any fraction of an explanation for why the peloton is climbing so fast these days.

The racing schedules were set in stone decades ago with riders peaking for the biggest races and using the small ones as warm-ups. The level is far higher in preparation battles like Tirenno-Adriatico, for example, than it was in the 1990s. So if anything, the level of the riders in the Tour de France should be lower, because they are in theory tired from the smaller races in which they have to do almost 7w/kg to win, and they do. But the level in July isn’t lower than it was, it’s approaching or arguably surpassing that of the most drugged farces of all time; for example, the fastest Tour de France in history was won in 2022 by Jonas, breaking Lance Armstrong’s record from 2005. And 2022 was not exactly the easiest parcours for setting that record. There just are not that many options for races to choose from (or skip) to prepare for the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia, or even spring classics. Jonas wanted to be at an extremely high level in the Dauphine last year (and won it easily), just as for decades the Tour de France favorite has used the Alpine one-weeker to prepare for July. So race schedule has nothing to do with it.

Equipment is a huge factor that is sort of tangential to the question. The aerodynamics arms race has made bikes and kits way faster than they ever were, by margins that significantly increase average speeds and climbing times in the positive direction. As an extreme example is guys doing things like wearing a pair of wind-tunnel tested socks to save 1.5 watts at 40 kilometers per hour in a road stage (1.5 watts, for those unfamiliar with that side of the sport, is less than half of a percent of a Tour de France rider’s Functional Threshold Power, which is about the wattage one could hold for one hour). But can you imagine what making 10 or 15 of these marginal gains and/or one big gain could do to your speed? That could be the difference between winning the Tour de France and finishing third or worse. I’m certainly not arguing here that socks are the reason Pogi didn’t win last year’s Tour; I’m saying everyone (except maybe Movistar and the some of the French teams hehe) is following in Team Sky’s footsteps in analyzing every aspect of how to make a bicycle go fast and, if the team’s budget allows, optimizing it. There are a million examples to list here, but I would confidently argue that a 2024 WorldTour racing bike setup and kit (particularly on one of the higher-budget teams) is at least 3 percent faster than a 2010 equivalent, which were already comically faster than a 1995 model. This enormous factor in the average speed category cannot be overlooked, just in distance running, the incredible speed boost of modern supershoes have rewritten record books at every level and rendered performance comparisons from Pre-COVID to post-COVID almost irrelevant, which for me has almost ruined that most sacred aspect of the sport dedicated my youth to. But I digress.

I want to separate the average speed from watts and watts/kg here. How hard you pedal for how long and how that relates to your weight is pure performance, a measurement for which we have near-absolute precision. Speed is a reflection of performance and the technology involved. My argument is that while speeds have gone through the roof and much of that is due to equipment, performance has also improved in the post-COVID era. I would bet a lot of money that Chris Froome in his prime could not push the 20-minute watts per kilogram (estimated over 7.1) that Joao Almeida, who is highly unlikely to ever win the Tour de France, did to win a stage of the Tour de Suisse last week. Put 2013 Chris Froome on Almeida’s 2024 bike and in the race in Switzerland last week, and I don’t think he’s finishing on the podium of that stage. That’s crazy. The man won seven Grand Tours.

Finally, there is no evidence I am aware of that the peloton is drawing from a more talented pool of candidates it used to. If somebody has access to participation numbers in junior and U23 races in various countries, that may be helpful in this discussion. I have no idea where, if anywhere, to find that information. There may be some outliers in guys like Pogi and Jonas; logically, it is possible that those sorts of talents just were not born in the era to compete in the 2010s, or that those kids in that era with the talent never started riding a bike (maybe they became distance runners or soccer players?) But there is no way that the speed of the whole peloton can be explained by the fact that a few generational talents were born in 1995-1999 instead of 1989.

Okay, so now that I’ve fully dismissed all of the potential explanations for the insane increase in level besides rampant doping, I’ll bring one of them back: better training.

Training programs, coupled with the latent talent in a bike rider, are the single most important factor for determining how fast that cyclist will be. Training for a professional race like the Tour de France is an extremely complicated endeavor. How much should one ride their bike per day? Per week? Per year? What sort of intensity distribution should one perform within their training rides? How does one achieve that distribution and have it add up to the prescribed Training Stress Score (TSS, a measure of how much load the cyclist took on based on training volume and intensity) per week?

These are all questions whose answers vary depending on the rider’s characteristics, race objectives, and training history. Obviously, for example, you cannot jump into 20-hour training weeks if you haven’t ever done above 5. A sprinter does not need as much endurance work as a climber. A rider training for the Tour de France needs to do a significant amount more volume than somebody training for an amateur criterium.

So there are differences in training approaches, even for the best riders in the world and especially across eras. The bottom line here is that we just do not know much about the training of riders like Jonas Vingegaard, Tadej Pogacar, or in different eras Chris Froome or Marco Pantani. I’ve done analysis of Pogi’s teammate McNulty’s training program this year, and Jonas has teammates that post on Strava (with power data stripped) so we can make some assumptions. Froome discussed his training a little in his autobiography. I’m not sure if Pantani even used a power meter, but when you’re to the gills on EPO, you can get away with less-precise training approaches.

My conclusion is mostly speculative and draws from the world of distance running: There have been massive innovations in training methods in that world (in particular the widespread use of threshold training and double-threshold days, AKA the Norwegian model), and some performances, even accounting for supershoes, have started to catch up to the EPO era times as a result. Why wouldn’t the same thing be happening in cycling, and couldn’t that explain the ridiculous increase in performances since 2019? Of course it could.

Also, I haven’t even mentioned this before, but the forced layoff from racing during the COVID shutdown itself gave riders a solid 5+month uninterrupted training block that they are still profiting from. I have always believed that training is far superior to racing in terms of building fitness due to training’s more precise nature; racing is only needed in very small quantities to sharpen the axe that final 1-2 percent, or in cycling specifically, to help riders with their racecraft. Top distance runners might race 15-20 times a year at most, depending on their event. Marathoners do two per year. Cyclists race as much 80 days per year (though of course, the intensity of most of those races is far lower than in a track race or marathon).

So when the whole peloton resumed racing in the late summer of 2020 with months of specific preparation (much of it indoors, on a trainer, which is even more precise than riding outside with a power meter) it was very little surprise to me that everybody immediately started breaking records. The commentators, who are mostly much older than I am, were shocked. My mantra in endurance sports is simple: physiological ability, which as I stated above is determined overwhelmingly by two factors; talent and training, will almost always win. Tactics, the mental side of things, hopes and prayers, etc are successful in a vanishingly small number of races.

I have been watching Tour de France: Unchained Season 2 on Netflix, which chronicles the 2023 Tour de France. I think specifically of episode two, in which Jai Hindley pulls off the ultimate tactical coup for a GC rider on Stage Five by sneaking into a massive breakaway, sitting in the wheels and dropping everybody on the final climb to solo to the finish line, win the stage, gain time on his rivals and claim the yellow jersey. The series emphasizes how crucial, and emotional this day was for Bora-Hansgrohe, its management, and Jai himself, and how devastating it was for a guy like Ben O’Connor, a rival Australian on a French team with dreams of pulling on the maillot jaune and winning the Tour de France. But as badly as Jai and Ben wanted to win the race, as hard as they have trained for their entire lives for this moment, the next day in the Pyrenees, Wilco Kelderman and Sepp Kuss got on the front of the peloton atop the Tourmalet and shredded Hindley, resplendent in yellow but without the physical capabilities to climb like Pogi and Jonas, off of the wheel by two minutes. O’Connor had long before gone out the back of the peloton. Pogacar won the stage and the Tour de France was again a two-horse race with no one else even in the frame.

It does not matter how bad you want to win the race or how hard you train if you ain’t got the talent to mash out 7w/kg for a long time these days. There are about a dozen guys like Hindley (who will be a domestique for Primoz Roglic this year, by the way) in the peloton, a thousand more with freakish abilities like him who never made it to the Tour to begin with, and a million more who probably harbored the Dream at some point in their life, but quickly realized they would never be good enough. Yes, sport is quite cruel sometimes. Such is life.

Of course, miracles happen in cycling, but they are incredibly rare. For example, the more I think about Sepp’s win the Vuelta last year, the less it seems like a miracle and the closer it gets to a fluke. I take nothing away from his victory and feel proud of it as an American, but I have to point out that it was not the Tour de France. He didn’t beat Pogacar, and Jonas, who was not in peak condition, was a teammate who sort of gifted him the race. Roglic begrudgingly did so as well.

That was a long-winded philosophical tangent with the aim of conveying my disdain for the romantic outlook toward professional sports. Of course, I love the emotional side of the sport. All of us in this community laugh, cheer, cry, and scream together. But cycling is so data-driven nowadays, everybody has to know where they are at. That is why I find it so amazing that a rider like Ben O’Connor, who would barely, if even at all, be within a minute of Jonas Vingegaard or Tadej Pogacar (and perhaps even Pogi’s domestiques the way they are going now) on a fresh 20-minute climb, loudly proclaim his burning ambition to win the Tour de France in 2023 (or ever?) I suppose that’s the champion’s mindset; you’re not going to ever win if you do not fully believe you can. But it feels pretty delusional from an informed viewer’s perspective. O’Connor is an easy target because he is the most prominently featured and the hottest-tempered rider in the documentary. But a lot of riders and management (like Richard Carapaz, David Gaudu, and Tom Pidcock, for exmaple) seemed to believe that they could win last year, when in reality they never even had a glimmer of hope up against the crushing abilities of Jonas and Pogi. I guess you have to try. It is the Tour, after all.

And what about the Sunset Tour of Thibaut Pinot, who, despite pushing record power numbers, could not compete for a top-10 GC position or win a stage? He was more forlorn in his interview before the Tour; knowing that Pogi and Jonas were terrifyingly better than him and hoping for his best result possible, rather than brashly stating that he could win the race. Pinot approached the race more intelligently than most of his equals, attacking ruthlessly and going into breakaways rather than just dropping from the GC group every day.

But in conclusion, the point is that the numbers don’t lie: the watts are the watts. Jonas did not win the 2023 Dauphine by 3+minutes over a flying Adam Yates because he wanted it more, he did it because he is that much better. And if you analyzed their data (lactate, heart rate, watts, weight, fatigue resistance, etc), you would find that and realize that if Jonas Vingegaard did not crash or get sick, he wasn’t going to do worse than second place in last year’s Tour, and Pogi would have had to pull something out of a hat, which he nearly did in the second week, to beat him. David Gaudu does not have the physical ability to win the Tour de France, nor will he ever.

And because the peloton is flying along the Classic roads and up legendary climbs as fast as it ever has, or faster, it’s more difficult than ever to win. The Tour de France is many things, and one of them is a sad reminder of the reality of our limits. Eliud Kipchoge likes to say “No human is limited” but that is objectively untrue. It’s easy for the greatest marathon runner of all time to say something like that. It’s less easy for the guy who got the silver medal, and less easy still for the guy who had to flee Ukraine with nothing but the skin on his back and start anew far from his home, assuming he even survived the onslaught. There isn’t always justice, or equality, and to pretend like there is stupid. Back in the cycling world, it certainly isn’t fair, for him or the spectators, that Jonas Vingegaard got horrifically injured in April and now the Tour de France looks like it will be a one-man show. But we all just play with the cards we’re dealt.

And who knows, maybe they are really all just doping. That would break my heart though. So I’ll hope for the best, at least on that front.

10 days to the Tour.

Jamie