You’re so vein ... look what the Tour does to your legs!
Make no mistake, Pawel Poljanski did not post a photograph of the veins bulging out of his legs on Instagram because he wanted our sympathy by revealing the gruesome toll of 16 stages of the Tour de France. even if the Pole did caption the picture, suggesting they ‘look a little tired’.
No, Poljanski, 27, would have been immensely proud of his pins, safe in the knowledge that such an appearance commands respect in the professional peloton. Three years ago Team Sky posted a similar picture of Chris Froome’s legs, declaring that their top rider looked ‘absolutely ripped’.
Low body fat is certainly a key factor but according to medical experts those bulging veins are also the result of the massive amount of blood that flows through the legs of elite cyclists.
Dr Bradley Launikonis, from the University of Queensland’s School of Biomedical Science, has said elite cyclists experience double the blood flow to their legs compared to recreational exercisers. Dr Launikonis said: ‘ The amount of blood normally going down to our legs is five litres per minute.
‘For an untrained athlete, maximum exercise will have 20 litres per minute. These elite cyclists will have double that, about 40 litres per minute. The blood can pool there too and that’s what’s happening in this extreme case.’
In his book, The Secret Race, Tyler Hamilton provided an insight. The american’s physical condition might have been chemically-enhanced, but the desire to get as lean as possible for the Tour was as strong then as it is today.
‘In mid- June, I started to get the signs,’ wrote Hamilton. ‘The first was when my arms got so skinny that my jersey sleeves started to flap in the breeze. The next sign was when it began to hurt when I sat on our wooden chairs. I had zero fat on my ass; my bones dug into the wood; I had to sit on a towel.
‘another sign: my skin got thin; Haven (his wife) said she could start to see the outline of my internal organs. The final sign was when friends would start to tell me how shitty I looked. To me it sounded like a compliment. I knew I was close.’