Tom Dumoulin talks about the evolution of nutritionin: "Back then, the person who received the knock last became the winner of the day"
Cycling
Tom Dumoulin has shared his expertise about nutrition in the peloton in the podcast In Het Wiel. The Dutchman comes from a time when everyone wanted to be as thin as possible. Nowadays the teams already know a lot more about nutrition and Dumoulin explains the differences compared to the past.
"In my early years as a professional, it was an art to eat as little as possible before training. Eating less makes you lighter. That way I taught my body to burn fats. The idea was: the fewer carbohydrates I give my body, the more efficiently my body should use them." The idea was simple, but the execution proved destructive. "One after the other then dropped out with hunger pangs. The person who received the knock last became the winner of the day."
Dumoulin indicates that he has also made huge mistakes with regard to nutrition. "In 2015 I did my diet a bit by feel. Then I rode a very good Vuelta a Espana. That's why I continued with it. The only problem was that I didn't consume enough fats. This meant that in the last years of my career I was no longer able to deliver the strength that I could muster in the years before. A test showed that I had the testosterone level of a little girl."
Nowadays, the teams in the peloton know a lot more about nutrition, as the former winner of the Giro also indicates. "In fact, that philosophy has been completely debunked. The gain is a lot greater if you burn a lot of carbohydrates within a certain period of time. So it's actually the exact opposite of what people, including me, initially thought."
"In recent years the level has risen so enormously in the peloton and there is only one real explanation for this: nutrition. In 2015, the Jumbo-Visma team still trained on an empty stomach, when they immediately had the worst spring they have ever had. Yet at a certain point they became pioneers in eating as many carbohydrates as possible before training."
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- Exactly who, Joey, is "they"? Flimsy, illogical conspiracy theories aside, it is in no one's interest (financial or otherwise) to "drive away small local events." Major cultural and macroeconomic factors are reducing ridership, but there is no "they" in this context.verve82520-12-2024
- And our virtual platforms allow us to "ride" famous place that we can't get to in person, which is a pretty fabulous aspect of this weird weird sport.RidesHills19-12-2024
- Which off-season are you referring to? The one after he won the Tour of California? The one after he won 3 stages and was on the podium of the Vuelta? The one after TJV screwed up, never put him away, and lost the Tour on the time trial? We've seen the guy hit the wall, lose energy, nearly fail, and lose races ("I'm dead") more than once. He's got a visible threshold and his fueling regimen is a clear weak spot. You'll need more detail to make this more than under defined insinuations .RidesHills19-12-2024
- Interesting analysis. And yet, I'm in the US, and at a recent wedding reception as a group of us older folks had to stand at a certain place to keep track of a thing, we got to talking, and every single one of us had a favorite rider, a favorite circuit of races, a moment when we fell in love with the sport, and a joy in the complexities of it all. None of us knew about the other's fandom until that moment. It's wonderful that these are my brothers-in-law, and we now know to talk about this when the spouses aren't listening. Point being: there are fans all over, and for US folks, the loss of GCN+ has been huge. As so often, it's the media bottleneck that matters more than anything else. Look at F1 in the US before Netflix, as an example.RidesHills19-12-2024
- On the one hand, what he says is trivial. Of course it's genetics. It always is, in any sport. That's just obvious. Look at Mondo Duplantis, whose sprinting speed is key to his pole vaulting, for example - he's just plain faster than other vaulters and good at the rest of the event as well. In cycling, even when you take the most genetically weird group of people and give them amazing training, some will be better than others, as well. Distributions are distributions and there are outliers and that's just that. Pogacar's body is built for this kind of thing, it seems, with him only recently having had to pick up skills that others have used all along. I'm still inclined to believe that these folks are using entirely legal means to arrive at their shockingly good performance, given how more senior riders kinda complain about (or at least comment on) the regimens and control over the nutrition and exercise and all that. And in every population, there are edge cases of truly exceptional behavior.RidesHills19-12-2024
- And it’s likely going to get worse. They are going all-out to drive away small local events which are where a lot of new riders come from. They want fee income and Olympic medals. That’s all.JoeyB19-12-2024
- Oh Lordspock12319-12-2024
- Interesting suggestion, fo you think testing Tadej’s (or Bolts’ or so many others’) parents would have given us a preview of his potential then or what criteria do you have to pick parents with?Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- Even amateur teams suffer this sort. But this is also largely due to the precarious sponsorship, in very few sports do you find kit with so many sponsors having to be integrated and changing so regularly.Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- I think it’s pretty obvious what was responsible for destroying interest that used to be there.Mistermaumau19-12-2024