Video: How do cyclists acclimatise for Rio? Chris Boardman finds out

With this year’s Olympic Games only the second of the 31 editions held within the Tropics – the other was Mexico City in 1968 – issues of acclimatisation will have been an important part of the preparation of many athletes from countries with cooler climates ahead of Rio.

It may technically be winter in the Southern Hemisphere, but the average daily high temperature in Rio in August is above 25 degrees Celsius, with average relative humidity of 77 per cent, and conditions will sap the energy of riders on the already gruelling courses of the road races and time trials.

Chris Boardman, winner of individual pursuit gold at Barcelona in 1992 and bronze in the time trial at Atlanta in 1996 – and more recently, until London 2012, the head of British Cycling’s ‘Secret Squirrel Club’ – visited Loughborough University to find out first-hand from the sports scientists there how athletes are preparing.

“Rio is going to be hot and has the potential to be humid,” he said. “Riders should have done heat training camps and be acclimatised for humidity, so they should be ready to go on the big day. It’s quite a mountainous course as well, which will play a factor.

“Loughborough is overflowing with facilities to do all kinds of testing and we’ve been able to look at what happens when you expose an athlete to high heat and altitude, and we’ve been able to do physiological testing and simulate climbing all within a few hundred metres. It’s a pretty special place.

“Physiology testing is absolutely critical to an athlete’s preparation because it’s just putting markers down that you can then measure and see whether you’re getting better or getting worse, so there absolutely essential,” Boardman went on.

“When I was competing it was a big part of my work and it actually kept me interested in the journey rather than just the destination – there was something I had to beat, a marker in the sand.

“We’d try different types of training and then we were able to come back and assess whether that training had been successful, so physiology tests played a huge part in my career.”

Senior lecturer in exercise physiology at Loughborough, Richard Ferguson, commented: “For our testing ahead of Rio we’ve focused on the physiology and environmental laboratories to do a wide range of physiological testing before the athletes head out to The Games. This has helped us to understand their physiological responses and adaptations to both training and acclimatisation.

“What most riders should have done in the build up to Rio is spent a long period of time acclimatising to the environment they’re going to face – it’s in the longer events such as the road race and time trial where the thermal stress of the environment will have a significant impact.

“It’s not just the cycling, but any of the long distance events where the conditions will have an impact,” he added.