Pro training between the Tour and the World Championships

With the 2020 Road Cycling World Championships just around the corner, do you know what a rainbow jersey contender’s training week before the race looks like? And in this very particular year, where 10 months of racing have to be condensed into 3 months, have the most experienced riders, who know the usual recipe, had to modify the formula? Is there a new express method that involves recovering from the Tour de France and bringing performance levels back to their maximum in less than a week? How are the favorites for this somewhat special edition organizing themselves?

By Jean-François Tatard – Photos: Pixabay.com / Commons.Wikimedia – Florian Pépellin – Schamfken

A typical pro season involves building foundations during the winter and defining a maximum of two or three peaks in form during the season. We also know that it’s difficult to maintain peak performance for more than three weeks. However, for riders competing in the World Championships who just finished the Tour de France last Sunday, it’s also likely that their form has dropped. In any case, for those who gave their all on the Grande Boucle…

How to manage peak form?

Peak form for a pro is the culmination of their preparation. It’s the moment when their potential is at its maximum. It’s therefore logical to want to align their peak form with their number one objective! The competition where the rider wants to shine! But then: how do you reach this peak form?

To generate a peak in form, you need to build a year-long plan. You don’t decide during the 2020 Tour de France that the Imola World Championships will be the next objective. This is something that has already been anticipated and planned for several months with the coaches, staff, and selectors. The program has led to different training phases for the riders concerned:

1. A general development phase where the rider builds the foundation. Endurance. Base fitness. Probably in June and July if the goal is to perform well in Imola.
2. A more specific work phase adapted to the circuit’s typology. To the most probable race configuration. Where the rider simulates, for example, attacks at the right timing. Like Alaphilippe’s sharp attack on the Poggio after 280 kilometers of racing at Milan – San Remo. A move repeated 100 times in training until it becomes a reflex. We can imagine this phase in the first three weeks of September for these World Championships.
3. And finally, a tapering phase that allows the rider to regain physical and mental freshness over the last six or seven days.

And what about this last week?

It will be interesting to see on Sunday which riders who shone on the Tour de France will be able to make an impact on these World Championships. However, it is very likely that the 2020 world champion will have been holding back during the Tour. Or that they simply didn’t do the Tour de France, like Mathieu Van der Poel, Diego Ulissi, or Jakob Fuglsang. Because after a peak in form has been fully exploited, the performance curve inevitably declines. This more or less long period of mental and physical recovery is more about drawing lessons from the cycle that allowed – or didn’t allow – the objective to be achieved. It’s a time for introspection! An objective analysis with the coach of the positive and less positive elements allows for a new program, identical or different from the first, but for the following season.

A final touch before the objective

Rest is a big word. The week before the World Championships for a title contender is more about assimilation. This race is exceptionally long, so he does one last long ride on Wednesday. Probably between seven or eight hours. Depending on the athlete, it’s possible that he reproduces an intensity comparable to that of the end of the race for 20 or 30 minutes on Friday. Finally, he replenishes his energy reserves. It is indeed very likely that whoever wears the rainbow jersey on Sunday will not have changed the formula that has led, in the history of this sport, all the winners of this unique race to find themselves on top of the world.

Nevertheless, in the heart of this very particular season, the exceptionally short delay (7 days) between the end of the Tour de France and Sunday’s road race must be taken into account. For those who finished the Tour, it is undoubtedly unnecessary to add more training, and especially not in volume. They can rightly consider that after three weeks of racing, they have the necessary base fitness to shine on Sunday, although there have been no stages equivalent to the length of the rainbow jersey race. So even if they ease off and recover, they must still do some intensity reminders, so as not to let the body fall asleep. For those who will participate in Friday’s time trial, like Wout van Aert, one of the contenders for both jerseys, it’s a rest day on Monday, a gentle recovery on Tuesday, a medium ride of three good hours on Wednesday with a gradual re-start in terms of intensity, a somewhat muscular reconnaissance of the course on Thursday, before the time trial on Friday and a recovery ride the day before the road race.

Finally, there are those who played leading roles in the Tour de France until the very end. We are thinking, for example, of Tadej Pogacar and Primoz Roglic. The former must digest his victory, and the latter his narrow defeat. It’s not certain that they are ready to focus on the World Championships right away. But the strength and power acquired during the three-week race may be enough, at the end of the World Championships, to stand out. Because it’s hard to imagine Pogacar losing the excellent condition he had on Saturday in the Planche-des-Belles-Filles time trial in just one week.

The right dosage

Impressive on the Tour de France, Van Aert is the one with the highest odds among bookmakers. But the Belgian also gave a lot on the Tour de France, which may not be entirely the case for all title contenders, starting with Julian Alaphilippe. We know that the latter wanted to finish the Tour fresher than last year, to reach his maximum form from Sunday until mid-October. Thus, the Frenchman may have made a mix of the two methods, to continue to build up pressure.

We don’t yet know the winner, nor who will have adopted the right formula. But what is certain is that their condition will have been patiently built over the past few weeks and that given the difficulty of the Imola circuit, they will have been very strong to win.

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