Tour de France riders face a “logistical nightmare” in trying to keep their body temperature down from “dangerous” levels amid scorching conditions, reigning champion Tadej Pogacar said.
With temperatures of over 30C at the start of the Tour in Barcelona and potentially pushing up to 40C at the start of the fourth stage in Carcassonne, riders have been taking innovative measures to stay cool.
That has included wearing frozen vests, eating ice lollies or immersing their arms in iced water.
But the task of keeping cool has made riding the Tour much more challenging.
“It’s really a logistic nightmare when it’s hot like today,” Pogacar said after claiming the yellow jersey by winning Monday’s third stage when temperatures reached 36C.
“As a team, we really start to put a lot of effort into this, to bring so much water and ice to the riders.
“Sometimes the valley is long, I don’t know, 15 kilometres, and three guys go back to the car to take bottles and ice and keep cooling yourself. This makes a big, big difference.”
For Pogacar the key is simply to stay hydrated.
“The water is so important to keep your body cool,” said the 27-year-old Slovenian, a four-time Tour champion.
“Five years ago, (it) was definitely totally different than what we have (to do) now. I’m happy that is the way it is because the race is dangerous if you don’t keep your body temperature down.”
The cooling techniques have been on show since the opening team time-trial in Barcelona on Saturday.
Netcompany Ineos riders submerged their forearms in iced water while waiting to start their race.
Several riders, including French prodigy Paul Seixas have been seen warming down wearing ice vests, while ice socks, often stuffed down the back of a rider’s jersey, are a common sight.
Tour organisers have banned the use of ice socks during the race although several riders have been seen flouting that injunction and they are widely used before and after each stage.
Teams have used fans to spray water on their riders while the Alpecin Premier Tech team were chomping on what looked like ice lollies before the start of their time-trial.
In fact, those were frozen carbohydrate gels, used for the duel effect of cooling and fuelling.
‘We are ready’
The heat is increasingly becoming a major issue at the Tour, in part due to climate change.
The day before the 113th edition of the world’s greatest bike race began, France’s interior minister Laurent Nuñez warned that extreme heat could result in a stage being modified or even, “exceptionally”, cancelled.
“We are ready to adapt everywhere, always, the whole time,” Tour director Christian Prudhomme told the AFP news agency last week.
“Who would have imagined, in any case certainly not us, that last year we would have to divert a stage due to an outbreak of lumpy skin disease in a herd of cattle, something I’d never heard of until two days earlier,” he added last Friday.
Beyond just the heat, Monday’s third stage from Granollers in Spain, over the border into Les Angles in France, was threatened by wildfires which had broken out around 70km from the finish.
Firefighters had been called from all over France to help battle the blaze, which had torched more than 46 square kilometres of land by Monday.
Authorities told 10,500 people to evacuate their homes near Perpignan in the southeast and Tour organisers urged fans to stay away from Monday’s route.
Before the Tour began, Benjamin Sultan, a researcher at France’s Institute of Research and Development (IRD) and the co-author of a 50-year-long study of the Tour, had warned that it was only a matter of time before the Grand Boucle would have to adjust to the increasing frequency and intensity of heatwaves hitting France and all of Europe.
He even suggested that the Tour would have to move from its traditional July date.
“Given that we’re going to have more than double the number of heatwaves at the end of this century, it’s just a matter of time before the Tour arrives at a critical moment that can affect its planning,” he said.