Sun, Jul 07, 2019 page11

• Tour de France going high on yellow vest centennial

  • AP, PARIS
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  With each crank of their pedals, riders on the Tour de France are to climb ever-higher into the unknown.

  For the first time in its 116-year history, the race that started yesterday features three stages that finish on mountain climbs above 2,000m. The unprecedented altitude is likely to prove decisive in deciding the Tour winner.

  The thinning mountain air, with scarcer oxygen, is to trigger a cascade of physiological reactions, right down to the cellular level, and sap riders’ strength as they fight to not get left behind amid the peaks of the Pyrenees and Alps.

  

  Cycling enthusiasts wait under a statue of Godefroy de Bouillon at the Place Royale before the first stage of the 106th Tour de France in Brussels yesterday.

  Photo: AFP

  Their lungs will heave, breathing harder and quicker to try to compensate for the falling air pressure. Their hearts will pump faster to increase flows of oxygen-carrying red blood cells to the lungs so they can pick up more of their precious cargo and rush it urgently to straining muscles.

  In the process of churning out energy with less oxygen, their cells will spit out greater amounts of lactic acid, stinging and burning their muscles, and interfering with their ability to keep those pedals turning.

  “When you ride over 2,000m, you definitely feel the difference, compared to, say, 1,000m or lower,” last year’s Tour champion Geraint Thomas said as he trained last month for his title defense.

  “You just can’t do the same powers that you do at sea level,” he said. “It is just like a thinner sort of air, really, up there. You can just tell, like, when you’re breathing, you’re just not getting quite as much oxygen in the lungs as you normally would.”

  By going extra-high at this Tour, organizers hope to avoid a formulaic race and keep the identity of the eventual winner uncertain for as long as possible, perhaps all the way to the end of the Alps on the last day before the Tour rolls into Paris on July 28.

  The last two mountain stages, to the Alpine ski stations of Tignes and Val Thorens, feature back-to-back grueling uphill finishes to above 2,000m. The other high-altitude uphill finish is on Stage 14 in the Pyrenees, climbing to the Tourmalet pass at 2,115m.

  Stage 18, the first in the Alps, also promises to be brutal, with a succession of three slogs to above 2,000m, the last up and then down from the Galibier pass at 2,642m.

  “It will be tough, especially the last two days of the Tour,” Thomas said. “Everyone is going to be tired then anyway, so that could emphasize the differences.”

  Organizers say their pursuit of altitude is also a celebration of this year’s 100th anniversary of the Tour’s iconic maillot jaune, the yellow jersey worn by the race leader.

  The jersey was introduced in 1919 at the 13th Tour and the first after World War I to make the race leader more readily identifiable.

  “We’ll go very high this year, often above 2,000m. Why? Because it’s the centennial year of the yellow jersey, because the yellow jersey represents excellence and because excellence elevates us,” Tour director Christian Prudhomme said in an interview.

  To prepare, riders have trained at altitude, but even the best-acclimatized riders will not be as strong at altitude as they are at sea level.

  Gregoire Millet, a sports scientist at Lausanne University in Switzerland who studies altitude’s effects on athletic performance, estimated that the amount of pedal-power riders produce is to drop by about 7 percent for every 1,000m they climb.

  At the summit of this year’s Tour, on the Alpine Iseran pass at 2,770m, their power output could decline by as much as 25 percent, Millet said.

  To incentivize riders to push through their pain, Tour organizers are tangling carrots on some of the toughest climbs in the form of time bonuses. The first rider to the top of the Galibier, for example, is to get eight seconds shaved off his time. So will the first to summit the Iseran, the highest road pass in the French Alps that has not been climbed by the Tour for 12 years.

  The bonuses “will have a real impact,” Prudhomme said. “I’m convinced that it can work to incite the riders to attack, to dare in the climb and not wait until the last moment.”

  However, push too hard, and riders’ bodies could push back to protect them from over-exertion, possibly starting to direct blood away from muscles to slow them down, said John Dickinson, a sports scientist at the University of Kent in England who specializes in respiratory problems among athletes.

  “It’s actually quite clever. In fact it senses how hard you’re working. It takes in all this information about how much waste product the muscles are producing and that starts to give off warning signs for the body,” he said in a telephone interview.

  “You get to the point where the body says: ‘We can’t go any faster, because if we do we’re at risk of sort of pressing the self-destruction button,’” he added.
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