Are the Tour de France Pros Doping? We give our thoughts...

Summary

In this episode, Ryan Thomas discusses the remarkable advancements in professional cycling performance, particularly in the context of the Tour de France. He explores the evolution of nutrition, training science, and equipment, highlighting how these factors contribute to the impressive numbers seen in today's cyclists. The conversation also touches on the importance of small improvements, or 'one percenters', and concludes with a discussion on the integrity of the sport.

Takeaways

The Tour de France has seen unprecedented average speeds.
Nutrition strategies have evolved significantly over the years.
Training science has improved, allowing for better performance without excessive fatigue.
The concept of 'one percenters' has become crucial for pro cyclists.
Equipment advancements have dramatically changed cycling performance.
Pro cyclists are now able to consume more carbohydrates during races.
The focus on recovery has become as important as training.
Heat and altitude training are now integral to pro cycling preparation.
The use of technology in training has increased consistency and performance.
There is a growing belief in the integrity of the sport among some athletes.

Chapters

00:00 The Evolution of Pro Cycling Performance
03:12 Nutrition: The Game Changer
05:57 Training Science: A New Era
08:45 The Impact of One Percenters
12:03 Equipment Advancements in Cycling
14:51 The Clean Sport Debate

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Transcript: 

Cam Nicholls (00:00.046)
Welcome back to the RCA podcast where today I'm joined by the RCA's head coach Ryan Thomas and today Ryan I wanted to talk about Tour de France pros. We just finished Tour de France 2025 and as per normal there's a lot of speculation about the pros numbers, the watts per kilos, like how are the pros doing these numbers compared to the pros of 10, 20 years ago and we know a lot of them were on the juice.

How is this possible? So, I wanted to get your perspective, because I think you work in this space, you live and breathe it. You know pros, I mean, you almost made a pro yourself, so you know guys over there in the mix. You're also in the training world, living and breathing it. You're in the nutrition world, you're in the 1 % of world, heat, altitude, all these type of things. So I feel like your perspective versus the guy that...

watches Tour de France highlights every morning and then goes off to work and has an opinion is probably a little bit more valid. And I feel like because you know all these things, your perspective is probably gonna be more on the, understand why they've improved so much versus yeah, they're on some new drug that nobody knows about. So I think you've got four things that you wanted to run through to give us a bit of insight or context as to why the pros are doing.

the ridiculous numbers that they are. So over to you.

Yeah, it's actually pretty wild. think the Tour de France was the fastest average speed for the tour ever. I think it was like around 43k an hour or something. yeah, really, really quick.

Ryan Thomas (01:45.098)
and you see it in, there's all the pros are talking about it. If you listen to podcasts with the pros, I'll see YouTube content with them. They're, they're all saying that the racing is just getting harder and harder. and there's, good reason for it. It's, there's a lot of increase in technology. So, and science, the four things just quickly, and then I'll dive into each one of them individually. The four things we're looking at are nutrition. So we all know that nutrition is a big, big topic at the moment. So that obviously has a massive impact.

second one would be training science, an application. So nutrition plays an impact on that, but over the last 10 years, 15 years, 20 years since Lance, was winning the tour, for example, training has come a long, long way. we know how to train properly and accurately and consistently now without causing too much extra fatigue. third one would be the, the one percenters, the training one percenters, the little things that

all the World Tour teams are doing now that they did in the past, but they're doing much better now because of science and applied application in science and training. And the fourth one, which isn't really, I'm not going to dive into too much, but we know that it's there, is the equipment change. So in the 1995, 2000s, equipment was terrible compared to now. Like two kilos heavier and bearings are slower and everything was slower.

There's, yeah, they're the four things that I think are having the biggest impact and I think most people would agree on those.

Okay, you know I'm a fan of rim brake bikes, Ryan. I'm not going to be taking offense to this, I?

Ryan Thomas (03:28.25)
Yeah, well, I'm not big on the bikes. I'll leave that. I'll the bike criticism up to you. That's your area. I'll talk about what I know best. So first one, nutrition. We know that nutrition has come all the way. Just an example, like even when I was racing in Europe and doing races, I remember taking in like

Our nutrition strategy doing like 180, 200 kilometer race was to take one to two gels an hour. And a gel was like 20 to 25 grams of carbs. Like that was literally the nutrition strategy. Get some hydrolyte or a salt tablet in every hour and take in a bottle an hour. So that's so different to what it is now. Like it's maybe a third, a quarter of what we're taking in now, even for a training session, let alone a race. So.

Would be, to interrupt.

Just to dig into that one for two seconds, would it be fair to say as well that it was more of an afterthought versus like a top of the tree strategy?

100%. Yeah, it was a nutrition. I think there were a few people who were ahead of the game and were forgetting in getting in a lot then a lot being like 60 grams an hour. But I think there was, yeah, the main thought was you just need to ride a lot. You need to get fit. Your body needs to get strong. And the nutrition is, yeah, it's there. And you eat a lot before and you eat a lot after, but during wasn't thought of as this big.

Ryan Thomas (05:05.39)
big performance intake, I think. I was never, we were never educated on it as young cyclists back in like 2013 to 2020, like that sort of era, even 2018, like that sort of era wasn't, yeah, it wasn't a big focus. The focus was around nutrition off the bike rather than on the bike, I would say. And I know like it's not, story isn't uncommon. Like every person I talked to was racing around that era and even before it was like,

You hear stories about people knew that they were on good form when they could go and do four or five hours on a long black. Like you could just, that was just their, that was their benchmark to know that they were going well, that their body was just so tolerant under load and under feeling and not being, being able to cope with limited amount of fuel that you just, your body just adapted. So we know that you put your body under stress and it adapts to a specific stressor.

that the stressor that we were putting ourselves on was under feeling and learning to have bodies were just learning to conserve, conserve, conserve. And we're all struggling towards the end of races and everyone was in the same boat really, but that's massive, massive reason why races are going faster and more intensity throughout the whole stages and the whole tours, for example. They can just, when you're taking in 150 grams an hour, it's just not, your body just doesn't shut down.

Yeah, and I look I am just some old bloke that races in the amateur scene in in Queensland, right? So I'm a nobody but if I just think about my own little experience recently where I went all in on the carbs and I was I was you know, I was trying to teach the gut how to tolerate, know around 100 to 125 grams of carbs per hour on the big sessions in preparation for a big event and I feel like

The reason why I performed out of my skin at the event and I was able to deliver high levels of power You know at five hours deep into the event and I was shocking myself I'm like this person isn't me was not because I was doing it in the event It was because I had done it in training for like many months leading into the event and it's the compounding effect right so like what the pros would be doing at a much superior level than I'm doing is

Cam Nicholls (07:26.478)
If you can actually do it in training, then you're able to push your physiology to levels that you previously weren't able to push yourself to. And then because you're fueling better in terms of recovery, you're recovering better as well. And we know in recovery, that's where, so if you're pushing yourself better, then you're recovering better. So you're absorbing those fitness adaptations. And then the next training session, because you push yourself further, you can push yourself further again. And it's just like this compounding effect that over time, you're just always able to go.

above and beyond what you previously would have been able to by under fueling and also you're adapting better because you're recovering better. And the pros have been doing this now for this, how long is this nutrition way of eating been in like as a focus for now three or four years. The compounding effect over three or four years is like, I just look at that standalone and it actually makes sense to me that they're doing the numbers that they are.

Yeah, 100%. There's two examples that I can think of in the Tour de France. Just from, if you follow a lot of cycling content on Instagram and YouTube, there's two people that posted interesting stuff, Power and Nutrition. Harry Sweeney from EF, they post a lot of interesting stuff. And he was talking about, there was one day when Ben Healy was in the yellow jersey and the amount of carbs that he was taking, because he was riding super freaking hard on the front.

He said for one hour, he doesn't even remember how many carbs he took because he was just like having like four gels in like 20 minutes. He said like 160 grams of carbs an hour in when he was going really hard. So it's just like, they're just getting in as much as possible. And I don't, they do not know where the limit is at the moment. if someone like Harry can take in 150 plus an hour, we don't know where the limit is.

And it used to, the limit used to be like three years ago, was like 90 grams of carbs an hour was all your body could take. And then it went to 120. And now people are taking 150 plus. So the limit is constantly getting more. What you were talking about, the other athlete is really interesting is Tim Wellens. In the second week of the tour on those power numbers, he did his best 10 and 20 minute power ever in the second week of the tour.

Ryan Thomas (09:48.546)
For someone who's been a pro for, he's probably been a pro for 15 years. Like to do that two weeks into a tour was probably unheard of. And in the middle of a stage race, think that goes, like this is going into our first point. And our second point is that the training and the nutrition, they're recovering so good that every day is the same. They're not getting to the third week of the tour and people are like struggling because people are just getting better and better and better. They're adapting.

every single day they're adapting within the tour. And some people, not this isn't an ivory one, because I haven't been there and I don't know what it's like, but I imagine that some people would be getting stronger throughout the tour. Like in the second and third week they're like, my legs are starting to turn up here because I've been putting some serious load in them.

Hmm yeah, and even the even though I know you're gonna talk about other one one percenters shortly But even the little one percenters that they do like immediately after they finish. It's like here's a bottle of you know things but I know like so for example I was with Visma at stage three behind the scenes, you know, one of the things that they have in the bottle is they've got carbs but they pour a

bottle of ketone IQ as well in there, so they're getting some ketones in as well. They're also having this red drink, which is a cherry juice, which is all about inflammation. And they're doing lots of these little 1 %ers in addition to the carbs. So there's a lot going on there that never used to go on.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. And I think going into the second point, the training science and improvement. And I think that also, that all comes down to consistency in what you're able to do week in, week out in a training block. We see people racing less now and focusing on training as opposed to using racing as their main preparation for big races. So the World Tour pros, I was...

Ryan Thomas (11:43.278)
Listening to watching a thing about Lance the other day and he was talking he used to get 40 to 50 race days in before the tour like that was Need to get those race legs to be able to be good for the tour But now you see people like Jonas and Tade like they do their big races at the start of season They may only do two two races in this couple of months before the two I know this is the same with a lot of other riders, but there's two best examples Is that they're using? racing as a fine tune

for that one, 2 % extra in the month leading into the race, as opposed to doing racing for two, three months before to get really strong and fit and used to the racing. They can do all that in training now because we're all the science and the measuring tools that we have are so, so far above what it used to be 20 years ago that they can do the training and get a similar stimulus out of the training as they would in a racing and get to 98%, 97 % of what their max capacity is. then that two,

2-3 % comes from those couple of races that they do as opposed to three months of racing for 30 race days before the tour.

Hmm interesting so and just from your perspective when you started training to try and make through the pro ranks But you know 2010 to 2015. What was the general? What was the general training strategy because I just add a layer on to that before you respond I remember interviewing a pro called Mickey Shah from AG2R a few years ago. He's a I interviewed him at BMC HQ and

He was a Swiss rider coming through the ranks similar maybe a little bit before you, he's like mid to late 30s. But he was saying that when he first got into it, it was just all about volume. That was really the key, volume, volume, volume. And he wouldn't put his bibs on if he wasn't going for longer than three hours. They would sprint to the next town.

Cam Nicholls (13:43.342)
bonking and then they would, you know, fill up with a croissant and a Coke and then they're off for another few hours. And that was, that really shocked me to know that that was the like guys getting into the pro level racing, you know, the kids, that was what they were trying to do, just do lots of volume. And it was no real specificity surrounding, you know, high intensity interval training.

Yeah, that was probably my experience until I started in a continental team and got some good coaches. Before that, it was just, yeah, go out and try and ride as long as possible. And when you're feeling good, go really hard, go long and experience the bonk. Like if it was really a week when you're training hard, where you didn't have two rides where you were bonking hard towards the end of a ride. Like that was just a normal, that was a normal experience for someone.

training three to five hours a day, for example. And I would argue that not many people, people training now, you're probably not bonking many, you wouldn't bonk at all. Cause if you're taking a 90 to a hundred grams of carbs an hour every session, like you get back from a three, four hour ride, even a five hour ride and you're like, cool, that was hard, but I'm ready to go and ready to go again the next day. And I think that's where, yeah, that's the specific training improvement is that we know how long

We know more about how long it takes to recover from a high intensity or a really hard session. you see less, you used to see a lot, was just like intensity, intensity, intensity. Like you're smashing the load. So you're trying to put as much stress on the body as you can, and then you're going into a vent and you taper. And it worked because your body adapts to what you're giving to it. But there's a better way to do it. It's not.

It's not do intensity every day. It's intensity then you rest for two, like a do zone two, and then you rest, and then you go intense again. And the quality out of that intensity, with the change over the last 10 to 15, 20 years, the quality of intensity now is much, much higher because we know the importance of being able to put an extra 20 to 50 watts out in a high intensity session is so gonna give you so much more reward than being fatigued.

Ryan Thomas (15:59.756)
and being able to do that session. Because the old school mindset was, well, if I can do this fatigued and I can put out 90 % of what I should be able to do when I'm fresh, if I can do it fatigued, then God, it's going to be easy when I'm fresh. It's the same old school mentality as you used to have the set of training wheels that were really heavy and slow and you used to put shitty tires on them so they made you feel slow. And then you put your race wheels on and your race tires and it's like, God, this is like a F1 car. Like it's insane.

So that was the old school mentality is you make everything as hard as possible in training so it's easier in racing, but it's nowhere near the case now. We know that if you go faster and you go better in training, the better you are in racing.

Hmm. Okay, what's the third one?

The one percenters we spoke, you spoke about it a little bit before, but all of the little things that they're doing now, it just, yeah, I think it adds up to much more than one percent. You're probably looking at more of five percent overall from an improvement perspective. I'll just list them off and I'm not going to go into all of them because they're probably all their own podcast topic each. But you look at altitude training camps and I think that

The adaptation in the last period from altitude training camps is they know that doing a specific number of them or spending a specific amount of time up there and the measuring tools that they're using at altitude for recovery, HIV and resting heart rate, for example, we know how to train better altitude now and the impact that it has and doing multiple stages, multiple training camps at altitude has a bigger impact. So if you do...

Ryan Thomas (17:41.42)
three, four a year, I'd say most of the pros are doing now and even 80 % of the pros are probably living at altitude to train, live high, train low, that sort of theory that we know that if you, the multiple exposures to it, later exposure towards a race will have a better impact, similar with heat training. that sort of, that adaptation and the improvements in applying altitude training for an improvement in performance has come a long way.

The other one linked to that is kind of heat training and heat training is something that's probably only been around for five years, maybe a little bit longer than that. Eight years maybe. I remember doing it a while ago when I was still training really hard. That was probably eight years ago now. But the heat training now is such a big factor for improving our physiology and our blood volume.

oxygen carrying capacity and we know the impact of that because it's been studied so much in the last five years that everyone's getting on that train and the pros can use it as a tool, especially for hot races like Tour of Spain is going to be coming up in three weeks. So I imagine any pro that's doing Tour of Spain has just started their heat protocol now and is going at it hard because they get 40 degree days there and that impact has a huge difference.

Yeah, it's a little thing you can do. very hard to do, it's a, yeah, it's a one. You might, sometimes you see a 5 % improvement in threshold from heat training. So it's a, it's probably, it's a considered a 1 % but it has a huge impact. The other things that you spoke about are like your ketone shots and your cherry juice immediately after and the specific amount of carbs that they're taking in after the race. So all of that is a little 1 % that you may not, and every

Everyday recreational athlete may not be doing all of these little things that has a big impact in the long run. And the 1 % has for a pro athlete who has a 400 watt FTP, 1 % of that is a lot, whereas 1 % on a 200 watt FTP is very relatively quite low. So the 1 % has have a huge impact on that sort of level just because of their capacity. So those recovery tools, think, yeah.

Ryan Thomas (20:05.782)
some of the biggest one percenters that the pros are definitely using day in day out because they can.

Mmm.

And the fourth one, wider tires.

Equipment. Well, no, the pros aren't going wider. I think the Nero shows hyphen this wider tire thing up really well. But actually, the pros are running 28 mil tires. They're only going wider when it's rubay or gravel. I think when you hear it from a lot of the actual tire manufacturers, they're sticking with 28s because that's what the pros are using. It's aero-optimized.

and weight, so I 28s are what the pros predominantly use, but the equipment side of things is enormous. I'd be really interested to see in a wind tunnel or some speed testing on like, you know, some of those old school, really mechanical, like Lance spec Trek bike compared to the bikes of today. Even like you did the video on the rim brake BMC versus a

Ryan Thomas (21:17.664)
a disc brake one, but even before that, the bikes before that rim brake BMC, like what, how slow actually were they? I'd imagine it'd be a lot, a lot, even just in the bike, let alone the wheels and the tires and skin suits and helmets and everything socks. it's, yeah, it's wild to think about how different all of that is compared to 15 years ago.

Yeah, it's interesting. I was speaking with one of the Visma guys, because was at the Tour de France last year as well, about the use of Cervelo S5, predominantly, particularly in the mountain stages. It's not so much because it's faster uphill, it's because it's faster across the whole stage. So like a lot of the hill stages, they don't start at the bottom of the hill and just go riding up, right? There's a lot of descending, so the aero bike's faster. There's a lot of the flat, the aero bike's faster.

There's a lot of false flat or two, three percenters where they're leading into the mountains, the aerobikes faster. So while the lightweight climbing bike might be faster for specific sections of a mountain stage, it's not the fastest for the overall stage. And if you look at BMC this year, they've literally just launched a brand new lightweight climbing bike and...

what is the bike that's being used pretty much 100 % of the time? It's the Team Machine R, it's the aero bike. I don't think I saw one pro riding the new lightweight climbing bike, which just goes to show that the aero bikes have come a long way, but also the analysis that the teams are doing and the data they have available to them. think about just technology in general, how much further it's come. They can now really narrow in on, what bike is the faster bike for the overall stage? And that's why aero bikes are.

are dominating these days.

Ryan Thomas (23:08.162)
Yeah, I think the big difference, I think the mentality around aero was like, everyone always says, it's like, I'll put some aero socks on or get aero wheels or tires or bikes and it gives me 20 watts like adding 20 watts. doesn't, aero equipment and faster equipment doesn't give you any extra power. It saves power. In a racing scenario, they're using it to save power. So I would say like the better way to look at aerodynamics from a racing perspective is

Oh, it's 20 watts less. I'm doing 20 watts less power for 90 % of this stage and then I'm the same power. So the reduction in power is the big difference from an aerodynamic perspective. You're going the same speed as everyone. If you're going the same speed as the person next to you and you've got better equipment, you're doing 10 less watts than they are. That's the difference. So I think that's why everyone's using aero equipment and why they're going with that because it's the majority of the time you're...

saving more power so you can spend it when you need it.

So all those things combined, Ryan, you think they're clean?

I think so. Well, just looking, looking at a lot of the, a few of the Australian writers that has done a lot of stuff recently and come from the Australian scene. And obviously they're, they're in their own world over in Europe, but I just, yeah, I, I back those people and they're competitive now. Yeah. And what, what they're saying. And I, yeah, I believe it.

Ryan Thomas (24:43.182)
I'm a very much an optimist. I know there's a lot of pessimists out there that we'll see otherwise.

Yeah, me too, I'm with you. look, thanks for your time, Ryan. And look, we may not be able to help you so much on the equipment side, but if you're listening to this and going, yeah, I wouldn't mind combining all those things. So the one percenters, the training and the nutrition side. Head to the Road Cycling Academy website where you'll see we've got nutrition plans. You can work one on one with the coach and there's other options there as well, which aligns what we discussed today. We'll catch you in the next podcast. Thanks, Ryan.