ANALYSIS: YOUNG RIDERS
The past two seasons have seen a youthful revolution in cycling. But why? We delve deep into the anatomy, training and mindset of Tadej Pogačar and co to see if it’s more than just coincidence
Procycling looks at the science behind the incredible performances by young riders in recent years
At 21 years and 364 days, Tadej Pogacar became the youngest winner of the Tour de France in 116 years when he won the 2020 edition of the race. Egan Bernal’s 2019 victory came at 22 years and 196 days, making him the fourth youngest ever. Then we have the likes of Flèche Wallonne champion Marc Hirschi, who is 22, and multiple stage race winner Remco Evenepoel, who has just turned 21. These riders make Giro d’Italia winner Tao Geoghegan Hart, who is 25, and 26-yearold Flanders winner Mathieu van der Poel look positively prehistoric, even though in previous eras they would have still been considered young riders. However, all five of these riders are still well under the average age of a Tour winner’s 28.5 years. So what’s going on? How are champions barely out of adolescence becoming the norm rather than the exception?
TRAIN LIKE A PRO
Digging deep into this youthful revolution required speaking to an old hand, Inigo San Millan
PhD. The Spaniard is assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
His areas of interest include exercise metabolism, nutrition, overtraining and peak sports performance, which is clearly paying off in his ‘other’ role as head coach at UAE Emirates.
“It’s clear that riders are training and living more professionally from an early age,” San Millan says from the team’s January training camp in the UAE. “I remember when I rode competitively, I didn’t follow a structured plan until I was around 19. Now, especially with European riders, they’re following a pretty methodical plan at 12 and 13.”
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularised the notion of becoming an expert after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, and it’s true that Pogacar started early, beating riders two years his senior when just nine years old. Bernal, too, enjoyed early success, winning two departmental races and finishing second in the Cundinamarca Cup at 11. In Matt Rendell’s Colombia: El Pasion! he reveals 12-year-old Bernal’s competitive 13-race calendar that included six victories.
Of course, professionals have spent their teenage years racking up thousands of miles since time immemorial. But it’s the ‘deliberate’ practice alluded to by San Millan that differentiates the current crop of successful young pros. “Power meters and software like Training Peaks have had a huge impact on training,” he says. “We can more accurately prescribe a rider’s daily ride, targeting the physiological adaptation we’re looking for. It’s only natural that if we’re monitoring riders earlier with better tools, the chances of physiologically developing earlier are enhanced.”
It’s a two-way technological development. While coaches have been dissecting power data for 20 years, it wasn’t that long ago that riders lacked a laptop to upload their results, meaning the coach couldn’t monitor, analyse and prescribe. The sport scientist had the knowledge but lacked the data. Now, nearly every rider of all ages is married to their smartphone. Where older riders are digital migrants, the new generation are digital natives.
This digital dawn has also opened up a network of information to riders which is immediately accessible. Riders are exposed to performance parameters like watts per kilogramme, grammes of carbohydrates per hour and training zones while at school. A history of anecdotal evidence meets modern-day metrics, which the clued-up and motivated junior rider listens to as gospel. Throw in the timeless appeal of icons – “if it works for that junior, it will work for me” – and you have the recipe for early success.
"If we’re monitoring riders earlier with better tools, the chances of physiologically developing earlier are enhanced” IN I GO SAN MILL AN PHD,UAE EMIRATES HEAD COACH
POLARISING OPINION
But it’s workload management that has been the key driver, says San Millan, especially the application of polarised training. “I was criticised when I started training riders like this. ‘No, no, you must do more high intensity.’ I resisted those calls because I knew it worked.”
Polarised training is otherwise known as 80:20, as its founder explains. “From our research, it’s clear that elite athletes train around 80 per cent of the time at what we’d call low intensity,” says one of the world’s foremost exercise physiologists, Dr Stephen Seiler of the University of Agder, Norway. “They then spend 20 per cent training hard.”
Seiler burned gallons of midnight oil wading through journals and studies of training intensity and duration, and discovered that sometimes by coincidence, sometimes by design, adaptations are raised and chances of overtraining are lowered with this 80:20 template.
“Many athletes, particularly recreational ones, feel like they must redline every session, so they do a lot of training in the threshold area,” Seiler says. “That’s around 80-87 per cent of maximum heart rate. They’ll improve but then stagnate. The problem is, they’re too fatigued to maximise highintensity sessions.”
By turning down the intensity for 80 per cent of the time, the cyclist lays a strong aerobic foundation. That leaves enough energy and little muscle damage to crank things up 20 per cent of the time to forge speed and power.
“But low-intensity exercise is key,” explains Seiler. “Studies have shown that during prolonged cycling at low intensity, the muscles release large amounts of interleukin-6 (IL-6), a cell-signalling compound which contributes to fatigue. Well-trained cyclists produce less IL-6, and this is one reason they’re more fatigue resistant.”
MONEY TALKS
James Spragg agrees that when it comes to tempering the adolescent rider’s burgeoning ego, polarised training maximises gains. The Brit, currently working in Austria, is a professional ridercum-coach and sport scientist who recently published a paper examining the training characteristics of under-23 pro riders.
“There were a couple of key takehomes,” says Spragg. “Firstly, we found that coming into the season, some riders were doing too much through too many intervals. What we saw is that you need athletes in good shape, ready for racing but you don’t need to overload them. Racing was enough of a stimulus on its own.
“We also saw that come mid-season, the athletes who trained more below threshold (a nice easy endurance pace) showed the biggest improvements. Polarisation was even more important during the season’s training as you can’t control race intensity.”
Spragg’s research involved riders from the Austrian Continental team Tyrol KTM. “They’re one of the better under-23 teams, competing in big races like the Baby Giro,” he says.
Despite that, there remain limitations. “Overall, we’re doing a better job at an earlier age in supporting riders, feeding information in a sport where training used to be based on myth and legend. We know the underlying physiology, so that even though a junior’s race distance is capped at 130km, we can see if they have it in them to upsize to the seniors. But it’s no coincidence that we’re seeing these young phenomena in the teams with the biggest budgets and biggest support teams. The coaching is individualised very early on.”
ACCELERATING INSIGHT
You won’t be surprised that Team Sky, now Ineos Grenadiers, were the forerunners of this coaching revolution, seeing the value in spending an annual £1.9 million on a rider and £100k on a coach, rather than £2 million solely on the rider. Every team now has at least one sports scientist working on performance. Numbers are crunched, predictions are made, the physiological battle is won. Which is all well and good but resources can’t buy time;
Every team now has at least one sports scientist working on performance. Numbers are crunched, predictions are made, the physiological battle is won
you can’t conjure up the experience of a Philippe Gilbert, the intuition stored from years of racing to know when to attack on the cobbles on a wet and windy spring day. Or maybe you can.
“In the past, experience really counted somewhere like the spring classics and, of course, it still helps,” says Deceuninck – Quick-Step trainer Koen Pelgrim. “But as a young rider, whereas before you’d turn up and have little idea where to position yourself at certain points in a race, now you have PowerPoints in the bus, the likes of VeloViewer to work through the course and fewer race days, meaning more time for real-life reconnaissance.”
The gradual rise of augmented reality is set to fast-track this experience further with teams like Jumbo-Visma having played around with virtual-reality units to recon time-trial courses. For the digital native, this will only accelerate their understanding of the tactical minutiae. For a rider like Remco Evenepoel, this shortcut is arguably even more important. The 20-year-old came to cycling relatively late after starting out in life as a footballer. He joined Anderlecht at five years old before moving to PSV Eindhoven’s academy at 11. He rejoined Anderlecht at 14 and also
captained Belgium’s under-16 national team. He switched to cycling in 2017.
“Remco graduated straight from the juniors to the seniors, leapfrogging the under-23s,” says Pilgrim. “But maybe it’s not that surprising. While he came to cycling late, he grew up in a professional sporting environment. As a footballer, he trained nearly every day and played twice a week. He was also a keen runner and ran a fast half marathon - one hour and 16 minutes at 16 years old.”
MINDSET OF A CHAMPION
Evenepoel also forged resilience from an early age, leaving his parents to stay with a host family – common with academy footballers. This is key. Physiology is wasted without a champion mindset. Talent likes trauma, particularly at a young age when the brain is more sensitive to experiences. In Rendell’s account of Colombian cycling, he interviews Bernal’s mother who laments her son growing up too fast. “He never had a childhood,” Flor Bernal remarks. “There was no time for one.” Sacrifices were born from growing up in financial hardship, from a desire to find a more prosperous horizon.
I raised this motivational theory to the then 21-year-old Geoghegan Hart at his first Team Sky training camp in Mallorca back in 2017. “If you want to be psychoanalytical about it, my parents broke up when I was young, so I’ve always been proactive about organising and looking after myself,” he replied in semi-jest. “I remember when I was 10 that I’d forgotten one of my goalkeeping gloves. I was so angry and embarrassed that I’d let my team and myself down; it cut deep.”
Geoghegan Hart was also part of a team that swam the English Channel at 13 years old. “Neither of my parents comes from a sporting background but they exhibit traits that are required for cycling, like grittiness and working hard,” he continued. “My dad’s a builder and often works 16-hour days. If he can put in that effort without 60-odd people looking after his every whim, I reckon I can do this. We have it easy in my opinion.”
Geoghegan Hart carries pressure lightly. As does Pogacar. “A huge box is his mentality,” says San Millan. “He’s calm and loves the competition. This is his natural environment, to the extent that he doesn’t feel that pressure like others do. I’ve seen many riders who fear losing but also fear winning. They reach a high level, move up and sh*t their pants. They can’t cope. It’s rare to see a mentality like Pogacar. The only other rider I’ve known like that was [Miguel] Indurain.”
San Millan also sees comparisons in their physiologies. The Spaniard had a resting heart rate of 28bpm. Pogacar’s aerobic capacity is up there with Bernal’s, with a VO2 measured at 89.4ml/min/kg. “But more important is Tadej’s ability to clear out lactate. I’ve never seen anything like it.” Lactate is the by-product of utilising glucose to generate energy. As lactate builds up, hydrogen ions associated with this increase raise the acidosis of the muscle’s micro-environment, which decreases contraction capacity.
“But lactate is also a fuel so firstly you try and recycle it in your mitochondria [the cell’s engines]. These are mostly present in the slow-twitch muscle fibres. This is efficiency. Riders like Tadej have a huge mitochondrial function.”
This efficiency means Pogacar shows the incredible trait of riding at a high intensity
“My dad’s a builder and often works 16- hour days. If he can put in that effort without 60- odd people looking after his every whim, I reckon I can do this. We have it easy in my opinion” TAO GEOG H EGAN HART
without draining precious glycogen. “The elites have around 500g of glycogen stored in their body, which is needed for real hard efforts like climbs,” says San Millan. What we see with Pogacar is that he continues to burn fat, even in intense efforts. Where one athlete might burn 80 per cent carbohydrates and 20 per cent fat, he’s the other way around. That not only saves his fast-twitch fibres for the end of races, but prevents him falling into a catabolic state. “That’s key because if you start eating muscle, you’re doomed as GT rider.”
TALKING METABOLOMICS
San Millan is a leading authority on the new field – to cycling at least – of metabolomics. “With a few drops of blood we can see between 1,000 and 2,000 parameters of the body,” he says. “We can understand how the body functions at a level that we’ve never seen before. Mitochondrial function, cell oxidation, glycolysis, anaerobic capacity, catabolic capacity… we start to observe differences between cyclists. Elite riders have a metabolic signature, a unique phenotype, that makes things like recovery that much faster.
“This is how we knew that Tadej would recover well at the Vuelta back in 2019. You could see his recovery capacity compared to others was off the chart. He was 19 and, historically, we might have said let’s give him the experience and maybe take him home after the second rest day. But through metabolomics, we could see he’d recover well, both between efforts and stages. And that’s what we saw.”
Pogacar would, of course, finish third, emphasising his powers of recovery by winning stages nine, 13 and 20. This competitive advantage is, San Millan says, down to epigenetics, the likes of Pogacar, Bernal and Van der Poel maximising their genetics thanks to training professionally at an early age.
It also gives the likes of UAE Emirates a competitive advantage, San Millan uses what he calls his ‘cheat sheet’ – 20 years of data, topped up by a couple of seasons’ worth of metabolomic results – to ensure talent identification is less of a lottery than years gone by. It’s why the acquisition of Hirschi, 22, went much deeper than a wealthy Emirate nation wielding their cheque book and why the star of Ineos’s new signing Tom Pidcock’s could burn very bright in 2021.
So where does that leave us? If Chris Froome is celebrating his fifth Tour victory this summer, with analytical eggs on our faces. But the evidence suggests that these anomalous results will soon become the norm. There’s no physiological or psychological reasoning preventing riders in their early 20s winning the biggest cycling events; in fact, you could argue it’s cycling’s historically dogmatic approach to training and racing that has held youngsters back. What’s more, young winners are nothing new [see table].
But in the professional world of sport science, the empirical isn’t replacing but complementing a rider’s intuition. Whether these early victors continue to succeed will be down to maintaining motivation to lead monastic lives as their bank accounts burgeon. But as it seems metabolomics possesses the potential to analyse a rider’s mental state, it seems the likes of San Millan will be ready to intervene even before the rider knows they have a problem.