The Last ‘Fast’ Tour de France?

As the Tour de France rolls into another July, anticipation is once again high for blistering attacks, daring descents, and the sheer spectacle of the world’s greatest bike race. It is, after all, the pinnacle of professional road cycling and its average speeds have never been higher.

But that trend may soon be coming to an end.

A series of proposed changes from the UCI could slow down the peloton, perhaps for good. While safety is the stated priority, these regulations directly impact rider aerodynamics and could fundamentally change how races are ridden and won.

#bike #cycling #tourdefrance

The Tour of France is the pinnacle of road racing and one of the world’s biggest sporting events. The average speed of the race keeps getting faster, giving us some epic battles, herculean efforts, and some super cool bikes. But some leading riders and key figures inside the UCI see that speed as an unacceptable danger that needs to be stopped. But before we talk about why the race might be about to slow down, we need to talk about how it got so god darn fast. All right, doping. Ask the average person in the street about how pro cyclists are so fast. And I’d bet most of them would say something about performance-enhancing drugs. Cycling and the tour to France in particular has a rather checkered past when it comes to well cheating. From the absolute vibe days of cigarettes and alcohol in the early years through amphetamines in the ’60s, roid boys in the 80s and then EPO in the mid ’90s, drugs did a lot to take speeds skyrocketing to stratospheric heights. And then seemingly things cleaned up a bit. The CIRC report points to the introduction of the athletes biological passport in 2008 as being a turning point. Since then, I think it’s fair to say that we’ve had fewer big riders getting busted for doping, though I will admit that that’s not exactly proof of cycling’s cleanliness. Some athletes might still be gaming the system, or they might have found a new way to dope. But if they’re not doping, then how come the Torance average speeds are faster than the doping gears? Aerodynamics. That is one thing that absolutely does help today’s to France cyclist go faster. Well, you can copy some of the pros here and get a huge speed boost if you want to. To understand why aerodynamics and kind of this is faster than this, you need to understand why it’s so hard to actually ride fast, but I’m not an aerodynamicist, so we should probably find one of those. The reason why you can’t travel at, you know, 80 km an hour on the flat um just by pedaling at a normal rate is because um the resistor forces is slowing you down and the major one is aerodynamic drag. I think one thing to bear in mind is that riders have always been strong and now with the advent of things like power meters and stuff, you can measure these things. You can say that someone has a pro cyclist has an FTP or an hour roughly 1 hour power of 400 watts. that would have been the case back in the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, whatever. So yes, okay, fine. If we talk about the EPO era, maybe people did have quite a bit more power than they did these days and still went slower, but the the equipment used will have been not as aerodynamic as the stuff you can go get now. Clothing has become more tight fitting. Um, and that makes an enormous difference. Out of this aeronomic drag component that we’re looking at, the rider accounts for like the vast majority of that. The bike is only a small portion. uh wheel depth. I think people have people have run kind of in the 50 mil range for a while. Uh and back in the day, you know, 25 years ago or so then you some of the deep wheels are a bit sketchy in crosswinds. Um so although they look similarish in terms of depth, um that’s not all that’s going on. Um so a bike still looks like a bike and that’s one of the things UCI wanted to do is to try and keep that double diamond shape. Um but because they have regulations in terms of how deep the tubes can be, people will fill those regulations with tube. uh if you’re still traveling at let’s say 30k an hour and you’ve got a rider who’s let’s say their total system weight is 78 kilos right so you got 70ish or 69 kiloish rider they’ve got 8 kilos of 9 kilos of kind of helmets and shoes and bike and clothing and stuff like that if you um reduce their um aerody um by kind of 3% or so then um that will save you um effectively a kilo and weight when you’re traveling uphill. So there’s there’s a whole spectrum of reasons as to why Arrow was a really good idea.
So why might this year be the last fast tour to France? Well, there may be a host of new equipment regulations coming into the sport next year that seriously hinder a rider’s aerodynamics. To give you a brief rundown, the UCI has proposed a raft of changes, including very controversially a maximum handlebar width of 40 cm outside to outside, plus a maximum wheel depth of 65 m, a maximum wheel depth of 65 mm, and there’s a ban on TT style helmets in road races, and all of these changes will take effect as of January 2026 in time for the next tour. What is the what is the the goal here? Is it to reduce speed? Is speed, maximum speed the real problem? Um, you know, I can understand uh very much the idea that sitting on your top tube on a descent is a bad idea from a safety point of view. Um, from a speed point of view, it’s great. You know, you go much faster. Aerodymic drag drops quite a lot. We’ve tested this in the wind tunnel. Um, but making people sit on the saddle and hold the handlebars, I think, is a good thing to do. So bringing in that rule as an example of doing something from a safe perspective is great. Saying that having a narrow handlebar is suddenly going to make you crash your bike because the speed is too high. Um especially when there’s a limit already and it’s not like people people can push it down to a 10 cm handlebar. Um I think isn’t the right thing to do.
In August there will also be a trial to limit a rers’s biggest gear to 5411. And for some reason, tires can be no wider than 30 millimeters, which would be fun at Parube Bay because that’s basically the minimum width these days. The first key factor here is the size of a rider’s gears, as this will affect the top speeds at which riders can actually pedal. Stram riders will be more impacted than Shimano and Campanolo athletes. So, Stram riders currently have a 5410 as their largest ratio, whereas Shimano and Campanolo riders are generally limited to 5411. Anyway, how often do riders need a greater gear size than this? Well, I’d say it’d be very occasionally because if you spin out this gear ratio, you’re probably going downhill. So, the rider will probably do an aot tuck and just save their energy. So, while I get that the UCI is trying to reduce the occasions where riders can put the power down on a slight descent, those riders are still going to be traveling at incredible speeds on descent. Look at Tom Pitcock’s recent video for Red Bull. 100 km/h he clocks and that’s not uncommon. Looking at other measures, widening bar width will increase a rers’s drag as their frontal area will increase. That should slow them down. But I’d suspect other factors came into the UCI’s thinking here. Firstly, bike control. They’ve referenced this in the past as a reason for controlling bar width. Then there’s aesthetics. I think that the UCI simply doesn’t like the way overly narrow bars looks. That’s pretty much why they’ve also banned the use of time trial helmets in road racing next year, too. But while they’re banning things on aesthetic grounds, should they take aim at other stuff? Aeros socks, white shorts, skin suits in road races. Let me know what you think in the comments. Okay, so doing all of that might make the tour to France slower, but we need to look at the reason for all of this. Will it do anything at all to prevent crashes? I best ask an actual bike racer.
So, Emily, do you see any of these changes making a blind bit of difference in actual bike races? I think I struggle to see how things like gear ratio, handlebar width, maximum tires is going to make a meaningful impact. I think British Cycling made a comment that they wouldn’t be enforcing the handlebar widths in racing because well, everyone I know rides bars less than 40 cm. And am I buying new bars to turn up at a weekly crit on a Thursday when I’ve raised 36 cm bars my whole life?
Can you point to one, two, three practical changes that the, you know, UCI could actually make to racing to make it safer? So I think if you think about reducing the chance of those pretty nasty crashes like in Formula 1 for example if there’s a serious incident there’s usually a pretty meaningful change that follows that whether it’s like a significant new rule new technology but I think in cycling what we’ve been seeing over the past couple of years are almost like predictable repeat crashes and nothing significant seems to be happen happening about it. So yeah, one I think optimizing sort of the course design and then the other thing I kind of touched on which is enhancing sort of like that rider care in the case of a crash. Another area which I’m pretty passionate about is like concussion protocols. I think cyclisters falling really behind on that. And you see lots of instances where riders go down, they stand back up, they’re visibly dazed, they’re visibly like lose their balance and they get back on the bike. And that’s because there’s nothing in place where they could get checked over and enter back into the race cuz you don’t get on your bike, the race is sort of gone. A way of assessing it on the roadside and also getting them back up to where they were so that there’s no pressure to immediately get back on. So, this might indeed be the last fast tour to France or fast as we know it. Now, we’ve spoken to an Aero expert and we’ve spoken actually to two racers and both of them think that really the UCI are kind of missing the mark on the proposed safety changes. What safety changes would you make or would you go even further and ban those skin suits and arrow helmets and all that stuff? Let me know in the comments below. Thank you very much for watching and we will see you next