On 7 July the Tour de France began in Dunkirk. Lance Armstrong, who won in 1999 and 2000, has called it 'a contest of purposeless suffering'. Cycling more than two thousand miles (many of them mountainous) in 21 days is as brutal a challenge as sport can offer. To meet it the human body is treated like a machine - the engine of the bike/body vehicle. The rider's performance depends crucially on metabolic efficiency - on the relation of input fuel (oxygen, food and water) to output muscle power. Fuel-foods, such as pasta and carbohydrate-loaded drinks, are the chief inputs. Asker Jeukendrup, a Dutch expert on carbohydrate and fat metabolism, uses the cheeseburger as a unit to describe calorific intake. Inputs equivalent to 28 cheeseburgers a day fuel the rider during a mountain stage and he will also take in 10 litres of water (and sweat most of it out). His metabolism is monitored like a racing car engine. It is possible, for example, for a rider's pulse rate to be broadcast back to the team car, and for the team manager to send on instructions about tactics and the optimum pedalling rate. Not surprisingly, there are riders who complain that they are treated like automata. It isn't surprising either that the Tour's great human dramas take place on the mountain stages where the riders' capacities are tested to the limits - of the energy equation, of the individual metabolism, of the pain threshold, and of whatever the brain-triggered hormonal system can do to push at them.

LRB 19 July 2001 | PDF Download