Everyday chicken, pasta and green beans ’til it comes out your nose’

Chewing on a badly soaked muesli breakfast, I read in Limburger on dietary behavior during the Tour de France. In other words, it is about changing eating behaviors. The rider’s body needs to be replenished to last three weeks, the way this is done has been so well thought out that it’s almost impossible not to get the right nutrients.

I have the impression that horsemen’s meals are very tasty these days; many drivers will likely face much worse at home next week.

Roy Curvers, who retired from racing in 2019, now sporting director at DSM, has been following the changes closely. It all started with Team Sky installing a mobile kitchen next to the equipment truck in the hotel parking lot. Dietitians and nutrition specialists reinforced the leadership team. The diet changed from two large meals a day to more spread out and very tasty meals. Curvers remembers the diet before the mobile kitchen: chicken, pasta and green beans every day “until they come out.”

Niki Terpstra, absent from this Tour, but also active for the star restaurant, adds: “The French don’t know how to cook. They even screw up a simple dough.

In the 1980s, hotel chefs couldn’t cook pasta in those killer kitchens in depressing industrial areas. From ‘my’ time I remember that only the vinaigrette had an acceptable level. It was the time when the management of the hotel tried to do something with the budget allocated by the organization of the Tour.

My switch to vegetarianism during those years had everything to do with the ability of French chefs to turn a veal cutlet – from an old cow – into the sole of a worn-out shoe.

In the peaceful eighties, science was not completely absent. With four teammates, I made myself available to a food scientist from Maastricht University as a guinea pig to map the relationship between energy intake and actual consumption. It was subsequently published in scientific journals such as The Lancet: taking a Tour was on the razor’s edge.

Separate time. On one side are the archaic team bosses who grew up as cyclists in the 70s, 60s, 50s, the ultra-conservative race bosses who promoted the mash pot as the perfect cyclist diet. On the other, the progressive trainers and team doctors who understood that a steak for breakfast was not going to make a difference.

With the biology major in high school – I had a nine on the final list – progress was still far too slow for me. As a science lover, I was looking like a madman for more perfection. I remember a foreman who regularly harassed me with his typical urban accent: “Nie mejju fak beejsjich”.

That’s how it happened then. He who practiced his profession was an eccentric.