Chris Froome has followed Professor Stephen Hawking and Apple designer Sir Jonathan Ive among others by appearing on the cover of WIRED magazine, the latest issue of which focuses on sport, including a lengthy article entitled The Science Behind Team Sky.
The monthly magazine’s main focus is on science and technology, and that’s evident in its approach to the discovering what has made Sky one of the most successful UCI WorldTour teams and win three of the past four editions of the Tour de France.
Written by WIRED’s science editor, João Medeiros, much of the article’s focus is on Chris Froome, who will next month seek to win the race for the third time, as well as on Tim Kerrison, the Australian sports scientist behind those victories.
> Froome releases performance data - but will it silence critics?
Medeiros spent a day in the car with Kerrison in April as they followed Froome training in the hills above Nice, where Team Sky has a base.
It’s far from a case of Froome simply jumping on the bike and sitting down with Kerrison to crunch the numbers afterwards, as Medeiros explains what the rider’s day comprises:
Two flat efforts on the time trial bike – 15 minutes and 12 minutes – with about five minutes of recovery in between … [then] a 20-minute climbing effort on the time trial bike before switching to a road bike and [a] final effort: 12 minutes of ‘spiked eüorts’ building up to four minutes of threshold.
But, of course, there are still numbers to be crunched; an awful lot of them.
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.
But for all the numbers and the science, bike races can – and are – won on instinct too, which as the article explains is what drove Froome to launch his attack on the first mountain stage of last year’s Tour in the Pyrenees, a surprise not just to his rivals but Team Sky’s management too, who didn’t have it in their race plan.
See the full feature in the July/August issue of WIRED on sale now.
www.wired.co.uk/magazine
> 12 ways Team Sky develops those marginal gains
I might try the credit / debit card / hotel ... luggage definitely slows you down. I did it in very early Spring and the weather was testing, but...
I'm not going to read all these comments, but let's see how things are in 12 months - there's much more disruption due to covid at the moment than...
I think it looks cool and by the review it performs. Top marks
Literally appeared out of nowhere.
Who cares... if you like it, wear it. Sniffy cycling attitudes are pathetic. Why are some cyclists so uptight about this? Bike not good enough at...
Yup, mine sadly came with a fork different from the one on this picture. Routing along the right blade of the fork, but the front of the crown...
This appears almost too good to be true. It's not talked about enough in the article but appears to work theoretically to turn any old mech into a...
I'm in the 'waste of time and effort on a road bike' school of thought. I persevered for a couple of years then threw a pair of 'perfecty good'...
While it might work on a steel frame, it almost certainly won't on an alu or carbon one, and is still fraught with risk in the case of steel. Is...
Can't argue with this- good news.