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When Chris Froome is racing, he imagines he has a bag of coins to spend. Every time he wastes energy, he needs to pay. He pays whenever he's pedalling against the wind. He pays when he moves up the peloton during a climb instead of waiting for a flat road where he can get maximum drag off the riders around him. He even pays for trivial manoeuvres such as collecting bidons of water from the support car that follows riders during a race. He pays because all these moments imply an acceleration, an intensification of effort that puts Froome in the red.
In physiological terms, the moment that requires payment is called the threshold: the point beyond which you cannot ride comfortably for a long period of time. At any given stage of a race, Froome will try to spend as little time over that threshold as possible, even if that means losing his position within the group. Froome is attuned to it. As he crosses that threshold, he starts feeling his body screaming at him to slow down. He starts breathing faster as his muscles demand more oxygen.
Then comes the pain. When it comes, he embraces it, knowing that it's highly likely that his rivals are in even more discomfort. He might look around the peloton checking for symptoms in the riders' body language. Alberto Contador, the Spaniard from team Tinkoff and winner of all three Grand Tours - Tour de France, Giro d'Italia and Vuelta a España - hides it well, grimacing for just a second. Nairo Quintana, from Colombia, sits very still on the bike, his face expressionless.
Froome, on the other hand, is perhaps the most obvious in his suffering. Elbows out, head down, ungraceful. But pain is sometimes a signal for Froome to make his move, especially if he has made his savings, carefully considering the energy that went into every single pedal stroke. He knows that when it comes to the final climb at a key stage of a Grand Tour, the rider with the most coins left is the one most likely to win.
That's what happened during stage ten of the 2015 Tour de France. It was the first mountain of the Tour, a hilly 166km stretch of road between Tarbes and La Pierre-Saint-Martin in the Pyrenees that finished at an elevation of 1,610m after 15.3km of climbing. Froome, who weighed 67.5kg at the time, averaged a power of 414 Watts during that climb. With 6.5km to go, he accelerated for 24 seconds, averaging 556 Watts. It was a devastating attack that left Quintana, his nearest opponent, for dust, and a performance so spectacular that journalists questioned its provenance.
In the subsequent press conference, Tim Kerrison, Froome's coach, told reporters that it was not unexpected considering some of the numbers the rider had achieved in the past. For instance, Froome's average power over 60 minutes, including the run-in to the climb, was 366 Watts, and Kerrison pointed out that Froome had exceeded that level on 15 occasions since 2011, in racing and training. Furthermore, his heart rate readings indicated that he had reached the stage feeling fresh and in good physical condition. In other words, he had saved most of his coins. "It's great when you manage to save as much as possible and you're ready for the last climb," Froome says.
"You know you're going to lay it all out there and just go for it." Of course, Froome's extraordinary performance wasn't just a direct result of his natural ability, but a by-product of his training. Kerrison was able to cite exactly how many times Froome had exceeded the power output number that he registered at Pierre-Saint-Martin; after all, he's been tracking data from every single pedal stroke his riders take, both in racing and training, for more than four years. That data is the foundation for the comprehensive and detailed training programme that all Team Sky riders undertake. "I work on the basis that everything we do is probably wrong," Kerrison says. "There are sure to be better ways of doing things. Pretty much every day we do things differently. The riders understand why we do things the way we do. They can always see how it relates to the overall picture."
Chris Froome, 31, has blue eyes and close-cropped hair. His body shape is ectomorphic, with long, lean limbs. His demeanour is quiet but polite and inclusive. When we sit down to talk in the living room at Team Sky's house in Nice, he asks for permission before reclining on the sofa. He either looks straight at the ceiling or across his shoulder directly at WIRED when making a particularly salient point, such as the moment he began to have confidence in himself as a rider and started being smarter about his racing style. He used to be careless with his energy. He was impulsive. Or sometimes team tactics dictated he had to attack at the beginning of the stage and, by the time the race reached the key moment of a climb, he would have nothing left to give.
It's not that Froome lacked the natural capacity; he always knew he had, as he puts it, a "big engine". He just didn't know how to use it. When he was tested in a physiology laboratory in July 2007, in Lausanne, Switzerland, he was told that the maximum rate at which he could consume oxygen - a physiological parameter that goes by the name of VO2max - was 80.2ml of oxygen per minute per kilo of body weight, and his threshold power sat at a 420W. These were the numbers of a potential Tour de France champion.
When Froome joined Team Sky in 2010 from Barloworld, he would produce incredible numbers in training, frequently much higher than his teammates, even though unbeknown to him at the time his body was ridden with parasitic flatworms (a disease called bilharzia, for which he was eventually treated). And yet, he was inconsistent when competing. By the 2011 season, Team Sky's performance director Dave Brailsford was considering dropping him from the squad. His standing in the team was such that the pre-race plan for the 2011 Vuelta a España said: "[Teammates] Xabier [Zandio], Morris [Possoni] and Froome will do their best to survive as long as possible and will fetch bottles, etc." He finished that Vuelta in second place, ahead of Bradley Wiggins, Team Sky's leading rider at the time. That, he says, was the big turning point in his cycling career. A year later, when Wiggins won the Tour de France, Froome finished second.
"I began to understand that I belonged with the best climbers," Froome says. "I wasn't struggling the way I thought I would be." He gained confidence and learned how to use his internal engine. When he repeated the physiological test in August 2015, his values hadn't shifted much - VO2max was now 84.6 and his threshold power 419W - the difference was due to his weight loss of 5.7kg. These were the numbers of a two-time Tour de France winner.
In 2009, when Dave Brailsford announced the creation of Team Sky, Britain's only professional race cycling team, the goal was to win the Tour de France within five years - a bold target considering that Britain never had much tradition in road cycling.
Winning the Tour de France had been a dream Brailsford had harboured since he was a teenager. He was brought up in a mining village in North Wales, and in 1983, aged 19, he decided to try competing in the Tour de France. He stuck his bike inside a cardboard box and bought a one-way ticket to France. "I grant you, I was a bit naive and didn't really appreciate the magnitude of the challenge," Brailsford says. "I went to the end of a bike race, when everybody arrived with their cars. I looked around for the nicest kits, went up to them with my bike in its box and said, "Hi, can I race for your team?" And they were all like, "What?"
Brailsford ended up spending four years in Saint-Étienne, failing to race at the Tour de France, failing even to become a professional. He eventually returned to the UK and completed a degree in sports psychology followed by an MBA at the University of Sheffield Management School.
In 1997, he was hired by British Cycling as an operations director to look over its business side. The programme was run by Peter Keen, a respected sport scientist known for his innovative approach to coaching. As performance director, Keen was taking steps to modernise an underfunded, understaffed team with no infrastructure for proper training. In 1998, after the announcement of Lottery funding for sports in the UK, Keen put together an ambitious and detailed plan entitled the World Class Performance Programme. He stated his vision clearly: to make the UK the world's top cycling nation by 2012. Few people believed it was possible.
At the core of his plan was the application of a scientific and rational method to the art of cycling performance. It was a clear break from a past dominated by a mindset rooted in tradition, low self-belief and an unwillingness to explore new technology. British Cycling hired performance analysts, physiologists and biomechanists. "We had a lack of history in terms of cycling. There were no professional cycling coaches, so we hired smart sport-science graduates, "Brailsford says. "You might say that with hindsight that was a great decision. We were lucky to have this group who came up with all kinds of weird and wonderful ideas. Nobody ever said that something was not going to work."
Perhaps the most significant step early on was the acquisition of a set of power meters for the bikes, which allowed the measurement of the energy per second the cyclists could produce: their power output, in other words. Whereas before, cyclists had to rely on monitoring heart rate, speed and perceived exertion - all parameters that were easily influenced by environmental factors and had nothing to do with performance - power output was an objective measure and was the perfect tool for performance-based training. It allowed track cycling to become a data-driven sport.
The power meters, along with other technologies like video analysis and aerodynamic testing, allowed British Cycling performance analysts to create a systematic analysis of the numbers - lap times, cadences, power outputs, drag factors - that their riders could produce. They would also do an in-depth analysis of the numbers that were needed to win races, a process they called analysis of the demands of the event. "We would go to the nth degree in terms of truly understanding what winning looked like," Brailsford says. "This allowed us to create a document called 'What It'll Take to Win'. We spent more time than any other team in the world doing that particular work."
By the time Keen left in 2003, Brailsford had inherited a British Cycling team that had already accrued significant success in the Olympics. Alongside its emphasis on sport science, Brailsford introduced an organisational principle called "Performance by the aggregation of marginal gains". As a philosophy, it was akin to a widely known business concept known as Kaizen, popularised by Toyota, which requires the implementation of a culture of continuous improvement. In fact, the name "marginal" came to Brailsford as he was reviewing some studies he had done during his MBA on marginal costing. In cycling terms, it meant breaking down everything that goes into riding a bike and looking for the one per cent shifts that would make a difference. It seemed obvious to Brailsford that going after big ideas was difficult to do on a daily basis, but small gains, which were often overlooked, could be regularly aggregated to create meaningful change.
"Marginal gains came out of the magnitude of change required, in terms of where we were and where we wanted to get to," Brailsford says. "And then, equally, I know this sounds a bit contradictory, the margins of victory. You could win a race by one-tenth of a second. And you're thinking, 'OK, if we could win a race by one-tenth of a second, all these little things over here could equate to one-tenth of a second. So, why won't we do them?'"
After the Beijing Games in 2008, with Brailsford still at the helm, British Cycling had become one of the most extraordinary success stories in the history of sport. Atlanta 1996: two medals, 12th place; Sydney 2000, four medals; Athens 2004, four medals and third place; Beijing 2008: 14 medals and first place. This was the sort of epic British success story that Brailsford wanted to replicate in road cycling with Team Sky.
"When we created Team Sky, we sat down with a blank sheet of paper and said: "Right, we're going to create a professional cycling team. How should we do it?'" Brailsford recalls. "We took what we'd learned and tried and tested over the years in British Cycling and put it all on the page."
During its first year of operation, Team Sky became well known for its relentless application of marginal gains, in stark contrast with the traditional professional teams at the time. Team Sky's jerseys were designed with a thin blue line that ran down the spine to symbolise the narrow margin between victory and defeat, made from a special black fabric that reflected heat. It hired Honda's Formula 1 logistics manager Gwilym Mason-Evans to gut the inside of the team bus and completely redesign it. It employed a team of carers who would go to the hotels where the riders would be staying to remove mattresses, vacuum the beds underneath and replace them with mattresses and pillows made of elastic foam that had been individually customised so that the riders could maintain the same posture every night. It taught its riders how to wash their hands properly, made them carry hand gels at all times and forbade handshakes to prevent the spreading of illnesses during competition. It had bike-fitting sessions using 3D motion-capture technology in Valencia, Spain. It ordered the manufacture of a Perspex cocoon in which the team could warm up away from crowds and the media.
The sporting results, however, were disappointing. Bradley Wiggins had finished fourth at the previous Tour de France riding for Garmin-Slipstream. Now Team Sky's main contender, he finished the next in 24th place. "We'd come into the sport thinking that we knew a lot, we'd won all these Olympic medals and it was going to be easy," admits Fran Millar, Team Sky's director of business operations and head of winning behaviours. "Bradley was having ice baths and drinking cherry juice and all sorts of stuff, but he just wasn't fit enough. Dave said that we had concentrated too much on the peas, and not on the steak."
Prior to the start of the 2010 season, Brailsford hired Australian performance analyst Tim Kerrison. He was a former rower with extensive experience of coaching and as a sport scientist for swimming. He had been exclusively involved in swimming since 1998, working with a group of female sprinters who went on to have a very successful 2004 Olympics in Athens. "There was this ingrained culture of swimming which was very conducive to developing good aerobic distance-based, endurance-based athletes, but not sprinters," Kerrison says. "We recognised if we do what we've always done, we'll get what we've always got. That needed to change. Let's forget everything we know about swimming and the way everyone trains and think from first principles. What do we know not just about swimming, but other sports and physiology and training science?"
Most training programmes at the time were based around the idea of periodisation. "It's essentially the way the emphasis of training shifts over time," Kerrison says. "This can include a greater emphasis on workload or recovery, or a shift in the emphasis of the type of training within a training block." Traditionally, periodisation involved an initial training period which was predominantly focused on endurance and aerobic capacity, with more intense anaerobic workouts that included speed and power training added later in the year as a competition approached.
"We turned the conventional periodisation idea around," Kerrison says. "It made more sense. One of the foundations of sports training is specificity, which means that everything you do in training has to be related, to some degree, to what you need to do in competition. So we began working on the team's anaerobic systems from the very beginning, developing their strength, speed and power. Only later did we lay on more aerobic training."
Kerrison had been working as a sports scientist for the British swimming team since 2005 when Brailsford contacted him. He had already received a job offer from England Cricket that he was about to sign, and although Kerrison had never worked with cyclists, Brailsford convinced him to join Team Sky. "I grew up thinking that the Tour was one of the ultimate sporting challenges," Kerrison says. "I still think it is. I can't think of many things more challenging and special to me than winning the Tour de France. So it's a meaningful goal. How realistic it was, I wasn't sure."
When Kerrison joined Team Sky in late 2009, Brailsford told him that they were not expecting anything from him until November 2010. His mission was just to follow the team around as they competed for their first Tour de France. They hired a camper van, nicknamed Black Betty, which Kerrison shared with fellow performance analyst Matt Parker, then Team Sky's head of marginal gains. Kerrison spent this time taking notes and talking little. "He travelled round with the team working with our power data and not really visibly much else. Everyone was just, 'Who is this weird Australian who lives in a camper van?" Fran Millar recalls.
At the end of 2010, after the first season of racing, Brailsford told Kerrison, who had been in cycling for about a year, that he was going to coach Bradley Wiggins and that he had to formulate a plan to win the Tour de France. "I did what I had done with the sprint swimmers in Australia: go back to the very first principles," Kerrison says. "It was a huge benefit to not have my judgment clouded by all the other stuff I didn't know and just quickly work out exactly what I needed to know. We needed to forget about the culture, and forget about all the bullshit and the peripherals."
One of the first things Kerrison did was to try and find out exactly what it would take to win the Tour. After all, much of the success of British Cycling had been built around a methodical analysis of an event's demands and knowing what it took to win. "Riders used power and trained for power to a certain extent," Brailsford says. "They would download their training information into the system and get nothing back, so they stopped doing it. Kerrison changed all that. Our compliance rates, in terms of riders, when they're at home downloading the data, went through the roof, because they all started seeing how it affected their training plans."
Kerrison adopted a database system called Training Peaks in which the athletes could download the data so that he could study it. Using this data, Kerrison did a power curve analysis for each athlete that showed, for a given duration - from one second to three hours - how much power a rider could sustain. ("It's an ongoing thing now," Kerrison says. "Every day we have a new current power curve for the riders. Over time we have built up a knowledge of what this means and how to interpret it.") Then, based on the data available for previous Tour de France winners and on extrapolations, he estimated the power curve corresponding to what it would take to win the Tour de France. "Those were the demands of the event," Brailsford says. "We compared the capacity athletes had against what was needed to win and trained the athletes against that."
Kerrison also understood that Team Sky would need good climbers that could perform at altitude and at high temperatures. "A lot of decisive moments in the Grand Tours are performed at well over 1,000 metres, sometimes as high as 2,500 metres," Kerrison says. "So if you're not able to perform at that level, then you're screwed, basically."
The body adapts to training at altitude, mostly through respiratory adaptations, recalibrating to different levels of oxygen. To address this, Kerrison scouted Europe for high-altitude camp locations, eventually deciding on Tenerife. "Britain doesn't have high mountains and heat so our cyclists weren't used to it," Kerrison says. "I did start to question if we were going to be able to compete with guys who spent their whole lives growing up riding in the mountains at altitude in the heat."
Still, Kerrison wondered how quickly the athletes would be able to adapt, so at the start of their first Tenerife camp, they tested their athletes' efforts at altitude and at sea level. On day one, the average difference in the athletes' threshold between sea level and 2,100 metres was about 70W. By day three, it was 35W. After two weeks there was no difference. The riders had acclimatised.
When Kerrison presented his plan to win the Tour de France, he essentially said that they had to forget about the details until they got the basics right. For Wiggins, those basics were conditioning, weight management, time trialling and performing at altitude and in the heat. "We were so caught up with the bells and whistles and all the clever stuff," Brailsford says. "We delivered all of that in year one and it didn't work. We didn't get our basics right. That was a big learning and Kerrison was a bit part of that. We decided on a new mantra that winter: 'Doing the simple things better than anybody else.'" That year, Bradley Wiggins crashed out on an early stage of the Tour, breaking his collarbone. In 2012, however, he became the first British rider to win it.
One afternoon in April 2016, Kerrison is at the wheel of one of Team Sky's Ford Mondeos following Froome as he pedals a few metres ahead in the hills around Nice, in the south of France. He had already completed most of this training plan for the day: two flat efforts on the time trial bike - 15 minutes and 12 minutes - with about five minutes of recovery in between. Then he took part in a 20-minute climbing effort on the time trial bike before switching to a road bike and was now on his final effort: 12 minutes of "spiked efforts" building up to four minutes of threshold. "Froome's anaerobic threshold is on around 450 Watts, but he rarely does anything at a constant pace," Kerrison explains. "He might do one minute about 30 Watts over threshold and then three minutes with ten Watts under threshold. Overall, the effort over that period of time would be at threshold."
This goes back to Kerrison's idea of specificity. While sometimes the pace is constant at a race, other times it is very dynamic, with pace changing all the time. That's what Froome is training for. Of course, on a more fundamental level, what Kerrison is manipulating in his mind is a more complicated set of equations describing the various cause-effect relationships between a training load and a physiological adaptation.
Consider the interplay between the distinct aerobic and anaerobic motors of an athlete. In simple terms, below the physiological landmark of the lactate threshold, the body is able to clear lactate as fast as it is produced. Above that threshold, it accumulates.
"People think developing the anaerobic system is a bad thing because it produces lactate and lactate is bad," Kerrison says. "It's only bad if you can't remove it. Otherwise, it gives you power. When I was in Australia we had some distance swimmers who, no matter how hard we pushed them, just didn't produce any lactate. I'm not sure whether that was because they weren't producing any or because they were efficient at removing it. We found out when we first measured Chris that it was the same. He would do a maximum effort and when we measured lactate there was nothing. Based on what I knew from swimming, I knew this was really promising. He was producing incredible power and whatever lactate he was producing he was able to remove. That indicated that we needed to increase his anaerobic capacity - his ability to produce lactate - because he had an ability to remove it."
Kerrison then adds another layer to the consideration of Froome's physiology: the nutritional fuel he uses for this aerobic effort. This fuel is a mixture of carbohydrates and fats, which are metabolised in different proportions depending on the intensity of the effort. The more intense the effort, the more carbs are required. But to Kerrison, even the way the body fuels can be trained and adapted, shifting it towards a type of metabolism that specifically benefits a rider racing the Tour de France.
"We restrict carbs in training and this shifts the metabolism," Kerrison says. "It drives an adaptation that makes the body become more efficient at using fat as fuel. So up to a certain intensity, say 200 Watts, Froome will predominantly be using fat as fuel. A significant portion of a typical five-hour stage is ridden at a relatively low intensity, meaning he'll be burning mostly fat, saving the carb stores for the more intense stages of the stage where it's needed the most - for example, the final mountain climb."
According to Kerrison, the interaction between those three types of metabolisms - carbohydrate-fuelled aerobix, fat-fuelled aerobic and anaerobic - is the foundation of Froome's training plan. When we return to Team Sky's house, Kerrison shows WIRED a five-page checklist that he keeps for each of his riders. It includes items such as power curve analysis, demands of the events, fat-carb metabolism, heat and altitude. There are 74 factors, qualitative and quantitative, that encapsulate Kerrison's understanding of what it takes to win.
It's the blueprint of what it takes to become a Tour de France winner, a title that Froome is defending this year after victory in 2015. He won it pretty much the same way as he had in 2013: by riding the first mountain stage very aggressively and earning a substantial advantage early in the race. That strategy caught everyone off guard. It wasn't part of Team Sky's plans; it was a decision that Froome made a couple of weeks before the start of the Tour and even Kerrison wasn't sure it was the best way to race.
Indeed, by the penultimate stage, Froome was struggling physically, exacerbated by a chest infection. Quintana, second in the general classification and 3'10" behind the leader, attacked relentlessly. "It was one of the days I had to fight the hardest to keep the yellow jersey," Froome recalls. "The pain was severe, but I knew that once I got to the finish line it would be done."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
