FRANCE— Walk around the team buses here at the Tour de France after most any stage and you'll see the world's best cyclists still turning the pedals even though they've just finished racing a hundred miles or more, often in extreme heat and over massive mountains.
Over the past few years, teams have incorporated more specific "active recovery" into their riders' performance plans. Chris Froome's Team Sky was one of the first big Tour teams to have its riders cool down on stationary trainers after each stage, and other teams have followed suit.
Riders get several benefits from pedaling after a hard day's racing, according to Keith Flory, the director of performance for the Cannondale-Drapac Pro Cycling Team.
Business Insider caught up with Flory to get the inside take on postrace pedaling at the Tour. Here's what he had to say.
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"The process of 'cooling down' has long been integrated into sport culture as a whole, but the application of it within sports is vastly different," Flory said. "Within road cycling, the process of cooling down certainly isn't new or revolutionary, whether it was intentional or not.
"Many times, riders will have a number of kilometers to ride to their team vehicles or, if they're lucky, to their hotel after a race. They therefore will have engaged in a cooldown during this ride, most of the time unknowingly. And this is where understanding and analyzing everything that is involved in the sport is so critical."
"I don't know whether Sky was the first team to implement more structure to their postrace cooldown protocol," Flory told Business Insider, "but they certainly embedded the practice into their postrace strategy very well, which has made it so visible to everyone else."
"There are some distinct advantages of using trainers to execute the cooldown protocol," Flory said. "First, you're able to execute a complete cooldown and not run the risk of it being compromised.
"For example, if, at the Tour, a rider used the roads poststage, it's unlikely they'd get very far given the crowds and road closures. Having the riders cool down at the team bus also enables the postrace nutrition plan to be executed without compromise."
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