With the extreme temperatures to come, organizing the race in the heart of summer is going to be hotter and hotter.
We are on July 24, 2055. The peloton is competing in the penultimate stage of the Tour de France. The young hope of French cycling Sandy Poulhinaut sprints ahead of his breakaway companion Bart van Aert to win the queen stage of the Tour de France, on the main square of Béthune (Pas-de-Calais). It was in the last rays of the sun, at 10:45 p.m., that the runner from the Parasol&Co team crossed the line, at the same time taking the yellow jersey from the Spaniard Jesus Delcambioclimatico, victim of a fall shortly after leaving Charleroi. (Belgium).
The course has kept all its promises. The ascent of six slag heaps coupled with a dozen cobbled sectors in semi-darkness – a novelty tested by the organizers to avoid the very high temperature which reigns over the northern half of France – allowed the attackers to express themselves. from the first kilometres. The tricolor runner did not hide his joy: “For me, it’s as strong as a success on the hairpin bends of Alpe d’Huez or Ventoux, when the Tour could still go there, in the 2020s. I saw the images of archives. On the side of the road, in the mining basin, the fervor was the same!”
Did you say “science fiction”? Nothing is less sure. According to forecasts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate (IPCC), the temperature will increase by 2°C in France by 2040, and in 2055, it will not be uncommon to have temperatures approaching 50° C in the southern half of France, particularly around the Pyrenees, the Alps and in Occitania. So many emblematic places on the routes of the Grande Boucle for a century. The situation, already worrying, will continue to worsen.
When the body is strained
“There have been 22 heat waves since 2010, more than during the entire second half of the 20th century. If they do not necessarily fall in July, the Tour de France cannot be spared”notes Florence Clément, information manager at theEcological Transition Agency (Ademe). Scientists expect a multiplication of extreme phenomena due to global warming, such as the mudslide which interrupted the last alpine stage in 2019 and precipitated the coronation of Egan Bernal. “It will be remembered as the first Tour de France significantly affected by climate change”, had declared on the air, prophetic, the British commentator Gary Imlach, on ITV. And it’s probably not the last.
Cycling for long hours will not be very reasonable in the summer. “We are going to reach the limits of human physiology”says researcher Jean-François Toussaint, director of theInstitute of Biomedical Research and Sports Epidemiology, who participated in the IPCC report. The ideal temperature for a long effort, such as a marathon or a cycling race, is always established by researchers at 10-12°C. When the mercury displays three to four times more, the human body will be unable to cool itself.
Perspiration and vasodilation cannot do everything, insists Gilles Roussey, author of a thesis on the relationship between sports effort and heat. “When you make a prolonged effort in an acceptable ambient temperature, the body temperature already rises to 37.8°C, 38°C, you are in slight hyperthermia”, he explains. Data closely monitored by the teams: the bulk of the peloton is already equipped with a body temperature sensor to measure the effects of the weather on the bodies of the champions.
“A 70 kg runner who becomes dehydrated from 700 ml of liquid will see his performance drop by 10%”illustrates Jean-Jacques Menuet, a doctor in the peloton for three decades. “But not all runners are equal in the face of the heat. It is nice to prepare for it by installing your home trainer in a sauna or hammam, it is your genetic heritage that will determine your resistance.”
“There is no miracle product, let alone illicit, against the heat.”
Jean-Jacques Menuet, sports doctorat franceinfo
A mountain stage in the middle of a dodger combines all the risk factors: maximum reverberation of the road (record to beat, 70°C in Carcassonne in 2022), hypoxia (an oxygen deficit) caused by the effort, and a speed penetration in the air – the only factor to refresh the runners – reduced to the maximum by the positive elevation. “The ability of the human body to cooling is limited, warns Gilles Roussey. Beyond 39°C, we enter a critical phase. You can only drink 1.5 to 2 liters of water per hour. Team nutritionists would find themselves with dehydrated runners every night for three weeks.”
Runners who derail
Unless the technology of refrigerating clothing, like the ice jacket that riders already use before and after the stages, makes giant leaps. “We can think of certain intelligent textiles used in foundries, or others which liquefy in the event of high heat to restore freshness”, says Gilles Roussey. The Israel-Premier Tech formation, which achieved a very convincing first part of the Tour, has thermoregulated jerseys using the properties of graphene. According to its designers, this technology makes it possible to regulate the rise in body temperature during exercise.
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This year, even while organizing the French championships in Cassel, in the north of the Nord department, many runners were victims of heatstroke, like Julian Alaphilippe, who was one of the favorites. Romain Bardet experienced such a mishap during the climb of Alpe d’Huez on the Grande Boucle in 2022. “JI really felt the heat coming over me. When I started having the chills, the pulse pounding in my temples, I said to myself that I had to take my rhythm.
Extreme example: during the world championships in Doha, Qatar, in 2016, the Dutch Anouska Koster had lost consciousness on the team time trial, disputed by 40°C, and had run head first into the railings. “It was like in a saunarailed her teammate Roxane Knetemann, quoted by the Guardian. If the UCI sends us to run in such heat, let them install a dozen ambulances along the route!”
The UCI has specifically implemented a protocol in the event of extreme temperatures. The routes of a race can thus be modulated in the event of unfavorable weather conditions, greater flexibility can be granted in terms of refueling and deadlines can be extended so as not to put the whole peloton out of time. The fate of runners in times of heat wave is also in the hands of the prefectures, like that of the Tarn which had forced a planing in order ofa stage of the Tour d’Occitanie 2022, reduced from 154 to 36 km with the stroke of a pen. Unless the medical profession gets involved: “One year, at the Tour du Limousin, which is contested inland, it is terribly hot, not a breath of wind, and the peloton refuses to startremembers Jean-Jacques Menuet. The doctors from all the teams locked themselves in a bus with the race director, and we negotiated to shorten the stage by two hours.
The organizers forced to backpedal?
The kind of scene that we should prepare to see again on the Grande Boucle? “This warming may force us to make choices in the future that we do not want to make”sighs the leader of the Cofidis team, Guillaume Martin, to France Télévisions. Shift the center of gravity of the Grande Boucle towards the north of the country year after year? “We could quite imagine a Tour concentrated in the northern part of the country, and keeping mountain stages in the Massif Central”, believes Jean-François Toussaint. Until the best climber’s polka dot jersey is really played out on the slag heaps of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, there is still a margin. But for how long ?
“It will be more and more difficult for runners to run in the middle of July with these increasingly high temperature levels, with heat starting very early in the day and ending late, with nights remaining. extremely hot.”
Mathieu Sorel, climatologist at Météo Franceat franceinfo
There remains the option of postponing the Tour in the spring, at the end of April-beginning of May, at the risk of offending the organizers of the classics, such as Paris-Roubaix. Romain Bardet is not ready for it, and he is not the only one: “The real challenge is to manage to keep this heritage which makes the richness and the beauty of our summer and a certain national pride, with the fact that our children and grandchildren can see the Tour de France in the same conditions in 50 years.”
A pious wish, for Jean-François Toussaint: “We will have to see if the cities are still candidates, since they will already have to manage the heat wave risk for their own population.” We suddenly remembered it during the Tour de France 2020 postponed to September due to the Covid-19 pandemic: the magic of the Tour is also the hedge of spectators that stands up all along the route.
“Even to attend a stage of the Tour will become dangerous for the population. Waiting for hours at the edge of an overheated road presents risk factors.”
Florence Clément, information manager at Ademeat franceinfo
Questioned in recent years, neither ASO nor the UCI envisage a review of their calendar in the short term. The UCI has just conceded that it is working on strengthening medical training for team doctors to better deal with the effects of heat on riders. “The denial of climate change is not limited to the Tour de France alone, it is found throughout society”, deplores Jean-François Toussaint. Will it take a “climatic Tom Simpson”, named after the British runner on the slopes of Ventoux in 1967, for things to change? “The work of sociologists has shown that reaching a phase of acceptance is always complicatedsupports Florence Clément. Even with informed populations, you need a shock, a triggering event.