A few weeks prior to a previous Tour de France, amid the maelstrom of planning involved with eight riders and more than a dozen support vehicles navigating the country, EF Education-EasyPost head performance chef Owen Blandy received notice of an issue at one of the hotels.
"It was fine," shrugs Blandy. "I just had a challenging few days before settling into my own kitchen." These days, it is an entirely different prospect, with vast sums spent on custom-built food trucks, personalised nutrition apps and meticulously-planned meal regimes all in the name of performance enhancement.
"We know their individual bodies, their metabolism, how many calories they burn when resting and exactly what they will do in training, the intensity, how long and how many calories they will burn," says Visma-Lease a Bike head of nutrition Martijn Redegeld. With riders burning an average of 6,000 calories per day during the Tour , Visma-Lease a Bike have even begun using Artificial Intelligence to help determine precisely how much - and what type of - food each individual cyclist should consume.where various algorithms are used to generate individualised nutrition plans.
Carbohydrates - usually in the form of rice or pasta - serve as the petrol, necessitating painfully high consumption levels. On-bike fuelling comes courtesy of roadside soigneurs who load up musette bags with a variety of high-carbohydrate forms that can be selected or discarded based on personal preference.
"The food I make is all transparent," says Blandy. "There are no rich sauces, it's all plain, simple cooking with a light amount of seasoning, light amount of oil, fresh herbs and citrus. "You need to swallow your chef ego and put it into a dessert or play around at the end of a race. Go wild then but don't mess with the simple stuff: the carbohydrates and proteins. Give the guys what they want and they will be happy.
Blandy's experience of European supermarkets means he knows where to find the highest-quality food and shops personally for most of it, in addition to emailing hotels in advance to order some perishable items.
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