As Tadej Pogačar and UAE Team Emirates-XRG face up to the toughest bike race in the world and the possibility of winning the Tour de France for a fifth time, what everybody wants to know is how he’s going to try to do it. Because while for the last two years, Pogačar already seemed to be streets ahead of the opposition, at the same time, in order to stay ahead, the battle for improvement in performance can never let up.
In part 1 of this two-part interview, UAE Team Emirates-XRG Head of Performance Jeroen Swart already discussed Pogačar’s margin for progression, the dangers of mental stress and the specific training for the Tour.
Here in part 2, he runs the rule over Pogačar’s rivals, takes an even deeper dive into his training strategies, looks at why he can produce his trademark ultra-long solo breakaways and discusses important changes in nutrition. Finally, Swart looks at one of the key recent developments in the sport that have helped make the UAE team, as well as its top individual rider, the most prolifically successful in the world.
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Q&A with UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s Head of Performance
Cyclingnews (CN): Following on from what we’ve already talked about regarding Pogačar’s performance, can you explain a bit more about how his low-cadence torque work helps him? Or to put it another way, can we still expect to see Tadej racing in the high mountains, trying to drop people using those ultra-fast accelerations?
Jeroen Swart (JS): Yes we can. But when it comes to the torque work, it is not just about the performance in the moment, though, it’s also a very key aspect of durability.
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Durability is the ability to continue to perform close to your maximum level after a prolonged workload. In some of the highest workload stages in the mountains, after three or four cat. 1 or HC climbs, we’re looking at total energy expenditure exceeding 4,000 kilojoules, and that’s when you’re getting to the point where most individuals demonstrate a loss of ability to produce power for a particular duration.
An example is, if you did the first climb as hard as you could, there would be a particular power output that you could sustain for 20 minutes, say 450 watts as just a rough example.
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Most athletes will start to show a decline in that ability after 3,000 or 3,500 kilojoules of energy have been expended. Also how that energy is expended is important, too, because we know that any work done above critical power – which is your power output that you can sustain for a prolonged duration, 45 minutes to an hour – has a more detrimental effect on your ability to produce power later on.
So we look at the various different aspects that can enhance durability because that’s typically when the difference is made is on the final col, the final ascent to the line and after 4,000 or 4,500 kilojoules of energy expenditure.
Previously, that was a weakness of Tadej. When he lost the Tour de France in 2022, that was on a stage that exceeded 4,200 kilojoules of energy expenditure. So one thing that the strength work does is it maintains the ability of muscles to perform.
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CN: Can you explain in non-scientific terms how that has changed for Pogacar?
JS: If you lift heavy weights and then have to lift a very light weight repeatedly, your ability to lift that light weight repeatedly will be enhanced compared to if you hadn’t lifted heavy weights in the first place.
That’s an overly simplistic explanation, but I’m sure you understand what I mean by that. If you have some extra strength in those muscles, then you can harness that strength late in a race or late in a stage, and that improves the durability, the ability to perform close to your fresh level.
Tadej normally loses less than 1% of his fresh performance despite having done 4,500 kilojoules of work, which is why he’s able to do these long attacks late in a race and get away and stay away. Other riders are starting to have that fatigue and that’s one of his key attributes, his ability to have exceptional durability at a very high workload. In Tadej’s case, his durability is exceptional.
Pogačar has outperformed his rivals on the hardest Tour stages in recent years (Image credit: Getty Images)
CN: Is also fair to say that his metabolism is also critical? Because I remember reading somewhere that his carbohydrate intake had gone up from 60 or 80 to 120 grams in an hour.
JS: Most of the teams are doing that now, and the research has shown that that is actually beneficial, and that is a key part of it. But one thing is actually ingesting the carbohydrate, yet there’s no point ingesting the carbohydrate if you can’t use it.
You have to train the guts to absorb it, so the receptors that absorb glucose and fructose, which are two different receptors – both can be trained and increased, particularly the fructose component has increased. In years gone past, most of the drinks were two thirds maltodextrin, which is essentially glucose, and one third fructose. Then the science started to emerge that showed that there was a capacity to increase the fructose side of things even further.
So most of the newer drinks are a 1 to 0.8 ratio of glucose to fructose, so there’s an increase in the fructose component, and that allows us to go up to 110 to 120 grams an hour.
On top of that, the latest trend now is to also include lactate as a fuel source, and that allows you to absorb even more energy than just the glucose and fructose that is in traditionally most energy drinks.
Most people in the past thought of lactate as a toxic byproduct of metabolism. It’s not. It’s a very essential step to maintain energy supply. And it’s an essential fuel. Your brain and your heart and muscles that are working at a lower intensity, selectively use lactate as a fuel. So if you can continue to fuel the brain, the liver, the heart, and other muscles with lactate, then the other muscles can continue to use the glucose and fructose and therefore you increase your total energy supply.
I think these kinds of nutritional strategies have been one of the very key elements that have seen the increase in performance across the peloton in triathlons and in other endurance sports in the last five years. Fueling has become a huge factor in terms of the enhancement in performance that we’ve seen. It’s really a big change that’s happened in the last 5 years, and we can’t underestimate that contribution to the performances that we’ve seen.
CN: Is there anything else?
JS: The other part is also training. So my former colleague [at UAE Team Emirates-XRG] Iñigo San Milan introduced the zone 2 training, and that zone 2 training is specifically targeted at enhancing the ability of the body to use carbohydrates and fats, but also very much the carbohydrate side in an oxidative way. In other words, to use them within mitochondria [inside cells] to produce energy, which is manyfold more efficient than using them glycolytically, which is when you produce lactate.
So enhancing that capacity is a key part of our training regime as well, the zone 2, what we now call metabolic training. We’ve shifted a little bit. I’m going to stop talking there now because otherwise we’d tell our competitors too much, but we’ve specifically focused on that as well.
But there are so many different facets to performance. It’s really a lot of different layers that we add into the cake.
Fueling has become a huge element of performance (Image credit: Getty Images)
CN: Are there any other areas regarding performance that have become more interesting for you right now or in recent years’
JS: I will tell you one. I think the most interesting one at the moment is one that gets talked about a lot but I don’t think is necessarily being used at the moment in a really fundamentally game-changing way other than maybe with us and a handful of teams, if that. And that is data integration.
We’ve spent the last five years very focused on it. That means taking all the disparate sources of data we get data from our group devices and these are multiple: heart rate variability, resting heart rate, sleep metrics, power meters on the bikes, the CORE sensor which measure the rider’s temperature, self-reported wellness questionnaires, subjective comments from our coaches that are uploaded onto our data integration platform on a weekly basis. If the rider is not healthy, we get comments from the medical team. This rider has a niggle in his hamstring, This rider has a slight cough, otherwise feeling well and so on, those kinds of comments.
We have developed a very, very comprehensive data integration platform with our team in [Al platform] Analog and we’ve now utilised the AI capability of that to generate the most in-depth integrated reports on a monthly basis. We literally create a 20-plus page report which describes all the facets of a rider’s training, performance, wellness, et cetera, in a single cohesive report which has a narrative as well.
What the AI is able to do so much better than a human being is that it’s able to take all these different data sources and look at them and the temporal relationship between them.
That includes, for instance, if a rider goes to the laboratory and has his routine blood tests, we upload all of the blood results as well. Everything is integrated into a single cohesive narrative where we can really see how all these different variables, what they’re saying and how they’re saying the same thing.
So if there’s a combined signal that comes from multiple different sources, it gives us that absolute clarity about which direction to go in and amazingly, the AI is even giving very concrete objectives, too.
CN: Such as?
JS: Advice in terms of ‘Don’t do another high intensity training session with this athlete until his heart rate variability score exceeds 150 for three days in a row’, for instance. That’s just a rough example, but that kind of advice means the coaches can then go back and say, ‘OK [do this]’ and we have rationale for it as well – why is this the case? Why shouldn’t we be pushing harder now? Why should we back off? Why should we do a different type of training?
That has been the most interesting and from a developmental perspective, one of the most profound things that we are seeing emerging now: that ability to obtain this very cohesive data integration and reporting.
CN: Is it fair to call it a game-changer?
JS: Absolutely. It is. It is a game-changer. It gives us so much more clarity in terms of why we should do things and what we should do, and it saves a huge amount of time.
If I had to work on generating one of those reports for a single athlete, whether it’s Tadej or Isaac [del Toro] or anybody else, it would probably take me a few days of focused work. Now we can generate 40 of them in an hour.
That’s the ability of AI and that is where AI is valuable. You hear a lot about how AI has not proven to be as fruitful as it should be and that it’s costly and so on, but in our case it truly is having a profound effect.
AI is an important training tool for UAE (Image credit: Getty Images)
CN: Is that something that you think has affected the amount of success that the team has had?
JS: I think so. It’s been a step-by-step process. Two years ago, we had all of the data integrated, and we could see it all visually and we could delve into it and we could look at it. And the AI two years ago would give us some interesting feedback prompted specifically by the user, you know, where you had to say ‘I’m interested in this relationship. Tell me about that’.
The new level of AI is where we don’t have to prompt it anymore. We just unleash it on the data and it comes back now with a very profound, in-depth and really meaningful analysis and insights as well as recommendations.
That is far more beneficial than it was two years ago, so we’ve continued, progressively to utilise this kind of technology – and it just continues to improve.
CN: A lot of what we’ve talked about feels like light years away from the last rider to win the Tour five times, Miguel Indurain, but one thing that remains relevant, maybe is that when asked which rival he feared the most, he’d always say ‘Myself’.
At a time when there’s been a lot of talk about Paul Seixas and the performance of Jonas Vingegaard this year in the Giro d’Italia, is Indurain’s attitude the one that Tadej takes, or is it more about using his rivals as reference points – like Pogačar did, in a sense, with Seixas in Liège-Bastogne-Liège?
JS: I think it’s definitely a matter of looking towards what rivals are doing, and I think Paul Sexas certainly is an absolute revelation to be at the level he’s at at age 19. We don’t really know what he can do in a Grand Tour. It’s going to be absolutely fascinating to see whether he has the durability to be able to last into the third week and at the end of those very severe stages in excess of 4,000 or 4.500 kilojoules.
Does he have that ability? Science would say that it’s something that has to evolve over time. It’s why we originally had the U23 category and it was recognised back in the day, too it just didn’t have a name. But has he already got that capability?
Jonas [Vinegegaard] has had a phenomenally good Giro. He seemed to be reaching a progressively higher level throughout, and I hesitate to say it but he was maybe riding within himself in the final mountain stages because he certainly wasn’t challenged. So, I think we have to look at our rivals and they certainly are a big motivator. And I think it’s going to be a really great Tour de France too, and one that will be exciting to watch.
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