Days of salted codfish and cabbage leaves are over: how climate crisis is shaping Tour de France’s future
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- Tour de France riders are facing 40°C temperatures this week — conditions one rider compared to "riding into a hair dryer" — compared with just 25°C in the Vendée and 29°C on the road to Caen during the 1976 drought Tour described by Geoffrey Nicholson.
- Mid-20th-century coping methods now sound "like medieval witchcraft": riders were limited to four bidons a day, ate salted codfish while training to attune their systems to dehydration, and stuffed cabbage leaves under racing hats to shade the nape — practices that persisted into the 1980s.
- Tom Simpson's 1967 death on Mont Ventoux while using amphetamines in extreme heat eventually ended the ban on feeding from team cars, after which riders had previously relied on roadside bars and springs — often catching bacterial infections.
- Team Sky, working with Gatorade, began testing riders' individual mineral needs in 2010; a single team in this Tour now gets through 80–100kg of ice a day, plus custom ice lollies with personalised salt levels, and the GB cycling team introduced hand-and-wrist ice-bath chairs in 2004.
- Race organisers are juggling two climate threats: finishes without spectators at Les Angles this week, which threaten the tourist spend that draws stage towns, and Alpine mudslides on the Col de Sarenne that echo the disruptions that ruined the 2019 finale.
- The author flags the irony that many Tour teams are backed by oil companies and petro-dollar regimes, even as global heating forces what may prove to be a profound rethink — possibly including changes to the race's sacred July date and primetime late-afternoon finishes.
Why it matters: The Tour's commercial model depends on stage towns getting spectator-driven tourist spend, and finishes without crowds at Les Angles this week show that calculus is breaking down under 40°C heat. The article also points to Alpine mudslides on the Col de Sarenne echoing 2019, meaning organisers now face simultaneous heat and extreme-rainfall risks that could eventually force a rethink of the July schedule and late-afternoon TV-friendly finishes that have defined the race for decades.
