FACTOR FICTION
YOU HAVE TO BE ‘OLD’ TO WIN THE TOUR DE FRANCE
THE TRUTH
A landmark study into what it takes to win the world’s greatest bike race was published in 2012 in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance. The research, entitled ‘The Tour de France: An Updated Physiological Review’, dug deep into what it takes to look Parisian street smart in le maillot jaune. One of the standouts was that the ‘average age of a Tour winner is 28 years old’, which rose to 29 between 1984 and when the study finished in 2011. By our own calculations, between Bradley Wiggins’ 2012 triumph and the 2018 victory of Geraint Thomas, that seven-year average jumped to 31 years old.
It cemented the view that while the fasttwitching muscle fibres of sprinters is left to the young guns, general classification winners require the accumulative endurance built over years of 30,000 annual cycling kilometres.
That was until 2019, when 22-year-old Colombian Egan Bernal became the youngest winner since 20-year-old Henri Cornet in 1908. (Cornet finished fifth but was promoted four places due to a quartet of disqualifications.) A staggering performance but an outlier, surely? Maybe not. Come September 2020, 21-year-old Tadej Pogacar made it successive successes for the new youth brigade.
Just what is going
