Is the Tour De France Getting Easier or Harder?

If the popularity of sporting events was ordained by the nature of their physical and psychological test, the Tour de France would far outstrip the football World Cup or Super Bowl in terms of spectator interest.

Imagine cycling 2,000+ miles at top speed all the way – this isn’t a Sunday morning jolly, with many of those miles coinciding with hilly or downright mountainous terrain. And when you’re not in the midst of a thigh-burning climb, you’re then having to put pedal to the metal for the time trial stages….where outright speed is the key.

Mark Cavendish won a stage at the 2024 Tour de France at the age of 39, making it a 35th stage win in total – breaking the great Eddie Merckx’s record.

But his anguished demeanour and puce skin tone at the finishing line revealed the all-body toll it had taken on him. Still, only 16 stages and around 1,500 miles to go….

After stage one, Cavendish told Eurosport that the Tour de France remains as hard mentally as it is physically, which reveals the all-encompassing nature of the race.

But from a physical perspective, is the Grand Tour getting easier or harder? As stage times continue to fall, it’s a question that is as pertinent now as ever before.

The Long and the Short

One of the interesting things about the Tour de France is that it has actually gotten shorter, rather than longer, over the years.

Below is a graphic that shows the total distance covered on the Tour at decade-wide intervals, and you can see clearly which direction the graph is trending:

Aside from the 1944 edition, which was cancelled due to the Second World War, you can clearly see that the Tour de France has been getting shorter and shorter over the past century.

The 2024 edition was contested over 2,174 miles – no small feat, by any means. But compare and contrast that to the distance covered in the extraordinary 1924 renewal: 3,371 miles.

Indeed, so tough were the conditions in 1924 that defending Tour de France champion Henri Pelissier described them as ‘inhumane’. One writer described the race as ‘….skirting throughout its length the extreme frontiers of human possibility.’

Of course, pure distance alone isn’t a great indicator of how much tougher/easier the Tour de France has become – in terms of pure physical exertion, the modern race may travel a shorter distance but it does so at an extraordinary pace. That 1924 Tour De France was contested at an average speed of 24.25km/h….by 2023, Jonas Vingegaard was winning at an average pace of some 41.12km/h.

Tour de France Average Winning Speed

This is to be expected, for the most part. Consider sports like marathon running and triathlon – times continue to get faster as the athletes continue to push the barriers of what is physically possible.

Why? Modern athletes understand diet and nutrition better than their ‘olden days’ counterparts, they perhaps deploy more rigorous and effective training programmes, and more than anything else they have far more dynamic equipment – that enables them to travel at higher speeds for longer.

The old-style Tour de France races were tests of pure endurance. Today, they incorporate elements of speed and stamina to create a challenge that only the most incredible road cyclists are able to battle through.

The Elevation Game

At the 1924 Tour de France, there were 15 stages contested – six were described as mountainous, while the other nine were considered to be ‘plain’.

Fast forward to the 2024 edition, and there 21 stages – seven of them were of the mountain classification, while four more were characterised as ‘hilly’.

And ultimately it’s that elevation gain, as opposed to the pure distance, that makes the modern day editions of the Grand Tour so challenging – the field for the 2024 race having to climb more than 150,000 ft in total.

Clearly, that’s tough on the legs, but there’s other ramifications of competing at high altitude too. Anyone that has walked to the top of a high peak will know that the air becomes tangibly thinner, making it difficult to draw in breath.

A cyclist’s body demands oxygen; that’s one of the chief ways to ensure that cramping and lactic acid don’t build up in the muscles. But after travelling up to the higher elevation, they will each find it so much more difficult to regulate their breathing and remain in peak condition.

Many cyclists train at high altitude – to prepare their body for the rigours ahead, partly, but also because the respiratory system is forced to produce more red blood cells when under such duress….which in turn helps the riders to enhance their performance at the lower altitudes. It’s almost like a form of biological doping.

Why is this all of interest? Well, it’s interesting to correlate elevation gain to the number of cyclists that simply don’t make it to the end of the Tour de France, and are forced to retire early.

It’s true that an early retirement can come about as a result of mechanical failure, but for the most part it’s as a result of injury and/or fatigue that builds up particularly on those high elevation stages.

So let’s take a look at the Tour De France results at decade-wide intervals again, this time considering what percentage of the field fails to make it to the finishing line.

Although it’s far from being an exact science, you can clearly see that the percentage of riders failing to finish the Tour de France has fallen significantly over the years.

In 1924, a staggering 61% of entrants failed to make it to the finishing line. You may recall that edition being super-long – 3,371 miles to be precise, which has evidently had an impact upon the number of finishers.

On four other occasions, the number of riders not finishing the course has totalled more than a third of the field – 1934, 1954, 1964 and 1994. Of the modern era, that number has fallen to 21% (2004), 17% (2014) and 14% (2023).

So what are we seeing here? Clearly, the modern cyclist is more able to withstand the rigours of the Tour de France circuit – helped, of course, by the shortening of each stage and the overall race too.

They get to enjoy better technology too – lighter, more aerodynamic bikes – sports-performance clothing and more scientific nutrition….more on that later.

So is the Tour de France getting easier or harder? When you consider the percentage of riders finishing the race, you would conclude that modern innovations have helped – and that, perhaps, the cyclists of yesteryear had things supremely tough in the Grand Tour.

Harder, Faster, Stronger….Better?

The pursuit of making professional cyclists go faster is, literally, a multi-million pound business.

The leading manufacturers retail their premium models – similar to the ones used in the Grand Tours – for four figures, enabling the Average Joe or Jane a chance to experience elite-level engineering.

Depending on whose data you believe, the annual budgets of some of the Tour de France teams – think Jumbo-Visma, Ineos Grenadiers and co – is in the region of £30-40 million. Being the best in the business is an expensive game.

World Tour teams budget for 2024:

UAE Team Emirates: 55 to 60 million euros.
Ineos Grenadiers: 50 to 55 million euros.
Visma-Lease a bike: 50 to 55 million euros.
Lidl-Trek: from 30 to 35 million euros.
Soudal-QuickStep: 25 to 30 million euros. pic.twitter.com/inBRz6sudw

— Lukáš Ronald Lukács (@lucasaganronald) January 29, 2024

That buys you the best riders, of course, but also the thing that every team craves: marginal gains in a sport where every second counts.

The equipment used is a big part of that, too. The bikes are more aerodynamic now than they’ve ever been, with 1x drivetrains providing simpler, faster and frictionless shifting of gears. Tyre and handlebar widths are also reaching all-new levels of skinny.

The clothing that the riders wear is being redesigned for those marginal gains too, which explains why they are so form fitting – not always for the faint of heart. Helmets are shaped to maximise aero-dynamism, and then there’s sweat-wicking ‘base layers’ and socks….any inch of a rider’s person has been optimised for maximum velocity.

Their training benefits from high-tech innovations too. Back in the old days, the only way to practice for the Tour de France was to get on your bike and start pedalling up some hills – today, riders benefit from software packages that help them to map out the perfect ordinance without having to hit the hills.

They say that to win the Tour de France takes a team effort, and that’s why the support staff can almost be listed under ‘equipment gains’. The efficiency of each team is such that each rider has everything they need whenever they need it – a team assistant is never far away.

Back in the 1920s, a cyclist was lucky if anyone was chasing after them with a glass of water and a cigarette!

Healthy Body, Healthy Mind

You could perhaps form an argument that the Tour de France has gotten easier over the years because pro cyclists are now in better physiological health than their predecessors a century ago.

They are evidently faster than their predecessors – aided by their modern equipment, of course, and able to maintain those higher speeds for longer….aided and abetted by a better understanding of the kind of nutritional input required.

All of the teams competing in the Tour de France now have nutritionists and food scientists in their ranks, and they have made a startling discovery – the human gut can be ‘trained’ to consume and tolerate more carbohydrates.

Those in the saddle are now consuming in the region of 120g of carb products – think energy gels, chewy bars and the like – per hour, which in turn is facilitating their remarkable performances out on the road.

This is double the average consumption of each 20 years ago, when it was felt that too many carbs in one hit could actually harm physical performance. Now, cyclists are guzzling as much as they can get their hands on.

You can compare and contrast that to the nutritional ideals of Tour de France cyclists of yesteryear – even the legendary Merckx, who is still regarded as one of the best to ever take to the saddle even now. His meal orders in his heyday would have been enough to give nutritionists a major headache today.

“First a small breakfast with the cheese and the ham and then steaks. It was horrible, but you know, you had to eat steaks to be strong,” the Belgian recalled, before proceeding with his typical menu at dinner time.

“Soup, maybe some fish….then pasta with another steak.”

Merckx wasn’t the only one to confound nutritional advice as we know it today. Some cyclists in the pre-war era took to consuming Binda Zabaione – an Italian dish of 20 egg yolks beaten with poor sugar, which was then drank through their water flasks. In the evenings and even on cold mornings, red wine and cigarettes were also not uncommon.

Is the Tour de France getting easier? It would certainly be more comfortable completing the circuit with today’s nutritional guidance, over the fags, wine and bizarre egg custard drink of yesteryear!

Ketones: Is All As It Seems?

If you’d said the word ‘ketones’ to a cyclist a century ago, they would have assumed you were talking double-Dutch.

But if you ever wondered if the Tour de France is easier now than it was in years gone by, these little miracle drugs explain the competitive advantage that the modern rider has over their long-lost counterpart.

What is a ketone? This energy source is produced in the human body by the liver, and can be used in periods of fasting or low carb intake. But there’s two types – a naturally-occurring version (endogenous) and a type grown in a laboratory (exogenous).

And, as you can imagine, it’s the latter ketone that has been a source of much controversy in cycling since they were ingested for the first time in 2012.

Although not backed by empirical evidence (yet), the anecdotal view of many top-level cyclists is that the taking of exogenous ketones helps them to ride faster and for longer periods of time, too.

For scientific purposes, ketones are not considered to be a glycogen preserver – meaning that, at the time of writing at least, they are yet to feature on the banned substances list. You can even buy them over the counter of health food stores.

So riders can dive in when they need a quick energy boost – be it at the start of a sprint section or a climb, which in turn has boosted race times and, seemingly, made the Tour de France all the more easy.

Some scientific evidence is emerging that ketones DO impact performance – specifically when it comes to recovering over the course of a stage, while helping to produce red blood cells, which in turn stimulates respiratory recovery.

It depends who you ask as to whether ketones are considered cheating or not – some put them on the same level as energy bars, whereas others have argued that this is doping….for a sport that has had its fair share of drugs cheats over the years, it’s a surprise that ketones haven’t been banned as of 2024.

Is the Tour de France getting easier? With all of these innovations and potions at the riders’ disposal now, it’s hard to conclude otherwise.