Things are hotting up at the Four de France. It’s going to be a warm day but there’s the trend of rising temperatures to consider.
Hot days are the Tour aren’t new but there are more of them. The Tour organisers keep a log of the temperatures each day on the course and they’ve been rising, this century their measured air temperature is up 1.7°C and the road temperature is up 10°C. A wealth of research and public data only backs this up of course.
The sport is trying to adapt. The UCI governing body now has a dedicated High Temperature protocol to build on its Extreme Weather protocol that uses a wet bulb measurement to account for temperature, humidity, windspeed and solar radiation, they also factor in rider acclimation. Once the threshold of 28°C (again wet bulb, not the air temperature) is surpassed then officials can meet to discuss a range of options from allowing more feed zones all the way to cancelling the race. Today’s stage to Pau won’t be as hot in terms of absolute temperature but elevated humidity raises the wet bulb measurement.
Teams also have their own procedures to mitigate. Heat training has become standard, it helps with adaptation but also elevates blood levels, a boost to Vo2Max. In recent years riders have been trying hot baths, saunas and indoor training sessions with their winter kit on to provoke a controlled form of heat stress (don’t try this at home).
Teams have a lot of work on hot days with the logistics of ice packs to chilled energy gels. Each squad can get through 150-200 bidons a stage, most of which is water for pouring rather than drinking, and more is handed up from the neutral service and the moto fraicheur. The TotalEnergies team doctor says his team can use 80-100kg of ice a day at the moment, an industrial ice maker has become essential kit for pro teams. Behind the scenes there are calls to have an extra car per team so that they can cover their riders better.
France had a moderate heatwave in May, a severe one in June and is now facing a third episode as the graphic from Météo-France above shows. Which brings us from weather to climate. Warming is a process, not an event. What is hot today could well be hotter in the future.
Faced with this infernal problem, what to do? One suggestion is to move the race to a cooler month. Only a huge factor behind the race’s success is it coincides with summer holidays in France, it’s a bike race for some but a socio-cultural phenomenon for millions too. If the Tour ever moves dates it’ll be because schools and factories have changed their patterns too. Besides climatologists say May or September won’t be immune from heatwaves either.
Rather than change month, how the hour? The race could start and finish earlier rather than taking place during the hottest hours of day. But an hour or two won’t make a big difference, we’re talking about starting at 8.00am to be done by lunchtime. But the Tour is cherished for its massive audiences and the further away goes from prime time, the lower and less valuable the audience, something the organisers and the teams probably don’t want; Visma boss Richard Plugge said words to this effect this week.
There are other potential measures, more stages could be held in Brittany which is cooler; but the spectacle would not be as good on the flatter roads. The organisers now rate climbs for their shade but this is marginal. The race is caught in its own commercial trap and these trade-offs won’t be confronted yet.
The wider issue here is a society trying to adapt to climate change and the Tour is just a tiny reflection of this. At the Tour and beyond there are arguments over what to do but few decisions. The problem is known but seems unable to be confronted.
Teams driving dedicated ice trucks around France to deal with the heat is not without irony. The Tour is a polluter, but possibly not in the way you think. There are 2,400 vehicles including helicopters and publicity caravan vehicles that are anything but fuel efficient. In an audit from 2021 the race produced 22,000 tons of CO2 for the whole race from team cars to publicity caravan, equivalent to 80 flights from Paris to Tokyo.
However that’s only a fraction of the Tour’s wider CO2 footprint. 94% of the event’s total emissions (Scope 3 in the jargon) come not from the caravan or team car convoy but spectators. Past estimates of the crowd vary from 10-12 million, now there’s talk of 15 million. Less impactful but still measurable is watching an internet stream as this requires electricity. It’s an example of big numbers: millions of people doing something small can have a greater effect than one organisation doing something big.
Presumably it’s not on Eurosport and other broadcasters outside of France but watch FranceTV’s coverage and the ad breaks feature clips encouraging people to travel to the Tour by bike – “if I lived in France, I’d definitely go bikepacking” says Matteo Jorgenson to camera – and the race has secure bike parks at the start and finish. There are sometimes special train services and discount rail tickets. French fans are given advice and encouragement to car share too. It’s worthy to try and move this 94% figure but largely beyond the race’s sphere.
Conclusion
France is heating up and the Tour’s own temperature logs show this. If trends continue the race will go from dealing with a challenge to facing a threat. But there are no easy answers, the Tour is a victim of its success. July remains sacred for now given school calendars and working patterns. The race seems unlikely to change if wider society doesn’t. The Tour is a microcosm. There’s big problem coming and nobody can work out what to do.
A funny topic for someone who wants to avoid too much politics on the blog! 😉
Anyway, I’ll try to avoid saying anything too incendiary. My guess is that for the foreseeable future we will see more adaptation rather than radical behavioral changes, so route and time changes instead of mandatory electric vehicles etc. The first thing I thought of was this year’s avoidance of the northwest, which would tend to make higher average temperatures more likely. Sadly for the area we’ve just been discussing (Carcassone-adjacent), this doesn’t bode well, as evidenced by the heat map shown above.
The map of the temperatures today shows the heat reaching a long way north; tomorrow’s map has just been published and the heat covers even more of the north. Still, on average Brittany should be cooler than the south but it’s likely to be a persistent issue and not just along for transition stages between the Alps and Pyrenees.
I wouldn’t worry about emissions from spectators, if they weren’t having a day out at the Tour they’d be having a day out somewhere else. Fortunately 2003 isn’t repeating as often as feared: heatwaves seem to be at least as intense but less prolonged.
Anyway, back to agentic coding on my 128GB RAM computer.