Web Summit: Tour de France talk sidesteps issue of doping

One of the main complaints about the Web Summit is that at a dinky 20 minutes most of the on-stage interviews are too short. For Chris Froome those 20 minutes were just about short enough.

Any longer and the two-time Tour de France winner might have come under pressure. Instead, after talking about hand sanitiser and memory pillows and stationary bikes, there wasn't much time to talk about anything else. Certainly not doping.

Although this clearly wasn’t why Froome had come to the RDS. One of the other main complaints about the Web Summit is that it’s too broad to have any tangible sense of outcome, and it felt that way after Froome finished his 20-minute interview on the “marginal gains” which helped him and Team Sky win this year’s Tour de France.

An even mildly insightful discussion into the current or even recent past history of cycling’s doping problem this was definitely not. This was a “tech” summit, after all, and for the British cyclist and his Team Sky, technology might well be just as important as what formerly went on in some teams’ laboratories.

Mildly insightful

That’s not saying Froome wasn’t mildly insightful in other ways: lacking that unbearable lightness of being a professional cyclist (“I’m in terrible shape,” he admitted), he was nothing but calm and humble in the company of Ben Smith from the BBC, who displayed considerable skill by going the entire 20 minutes without once mentioned the word “doping”.

Froome himself eventually brought it up, albeit indirectly, when suggesting that winning back-to-back Tours in the post Lance Armstrong era "takes some doing" – which is where those marginal gains come in. Because Froome, now 30, has every intention of defending his Tour title next summer.

"If anything it sets a mindset," he said, "that Dave Brailsford [director of Team Sky] sets within the team, that everyone is looking at all the different aspects of their performance, breaking them down, and in essence trying to find better ways of doing them. And they could be some very simple things, which might seem obvious from the outside, like having hand gel, on the bus, at the table, in the room, to make sure you're always sanitised.

“It sounds silly, but we really are on that edge, pushing our bodies to the absolute limit, day in, day out. And on the edge of our immune systems crashing. We’re very susceptible to picking up little bugs along the way, and in a three-week race, if you get sick, that’s a disaster. You’re very rarely going to recover.”

Recovery between stages, however, is crucial, which is why Team Sky brings all their own pillows and mattresses from hotel to hotel: “So you basically get the same night’s sleep, for every night on the Tour. That’s the thing about marginal gains. It’s not just because you’re sleeping on that same mattress and pillow. That’s not going to win you the Tour de France. That’s ridiculous. But it’s the accumulation of all these little things put together.”

During this summer’s Tour there were plenty of people wondering about the “marginal gains” which contributed to Froome’s crushing ride up the La Pierre Saint Martin, on the second Tuesday of the race, to take charge of the Tour; also to his Team Sky escort to the finish on Plateau de Beille two days later. There, and despite riding into a headwind, both Froome and teammate Geraint Thomas eclipsed several of the previous fastest climbs up the 15.8km ascent, including Armstrong’s best from 2002, plus several other rides achieved at the height of cycling’s doping problem.

“This past Tour de France went extremely well,” he admitted. “But if I’m brutally honest, I came away thinking I wasn’t good enough. I only won one mountain top finish. I should have won more. Cycling moves so quickly, you have to be looking at the next thing, otherwise you will slow down. So I’m still trying to find those extra gains.

“For 10 months of the year, it’s a way of life. You’re looking at everything that passes your lips, your sleep, the amount of time you’re actually standing on your feet. I certainly feel there is no endpoint. We don’t have the winning formula that you just go back and replicate, year on year. It’s a good formula, it works, but it’s always about improving.”

Turbo trainer

That’s the other problem with marginal gains: not only are they never-ending, but the opposition can very easily catch on to them.“I remember in the 2011 Tour we started doing warm-downs, after the stages. So after the 200km stage through the mountains we’d then get on the turbo trainer by the bus, and do another 10 minutes of pedalling. A lot of the other guys passing us on the way back to their bus were laughing at us, ‘what are these idiots doing, making themselves more tired?’ But slowly, one by one, all the other teams started it. It’s quite interesting to see other teams tagging along, doing the same.”