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Pro cycling looks great! The best road bikes and road bike wheels to race on, sunny bike rides on the worlds best cycling roads and quite literally getting paid to do what most of us choose to do for fun. However, is being a pro cyclist really as good as it looks from the outside and what does a pro cyclist actually get up to on a typical training day?
Thanks to Vision we got the chance to find out and spent a day with the Bahrain Victorious team on their winter cycling training camp in Denia, Spain.
Is there anything that we can copy off the pro cyclists to make us faster or more comfortable on the bike? We get to know the riders to find out...
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0:00
what is it like to be a pro cyclist is it as glamorous as everyone says it is is it all
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sun sea and spokes well when vision invited us to find out we headed on the first flight
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out here to join the team Bahrain Victorious on what an average training day might look like. So
0:31
we're going to be finding some riders, we're going to be finding out what makes them tick
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what do they eat, what do they do, what do they do when they're not actually riding a bike even
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though for quite a lot of the day they're going to be riding a bike. And what I want to find out is
0:45
is it really a dream job? Is it what it's all cracked up to be? Because obviously we often see
0:52
pro cyclists they're standing on the top of a podium it's all champagne and smiles but behind
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the scenes in january february is that the reality this is cycling weekly let's go and find some pro
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riders big rides need proper fueling but the barring victoria's team don't eat in the same section of
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the hotel restaurant as everyone else they have their own team chef who's been up for a few hours
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preparing enough food to feed an army. Most of the riders were weighing out their food before eating
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Each rider has macro goals and it makes sense that a 52 kilo rider like Lenny Martinez
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isn't going to need as many calories as the sprinters. As well as traditional breakfast items such as cereals and milk
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there's also loads of red fruits, jams, rice and pasta and porridge being consumed
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Oh, and more eggs and coffee than I've ever seen in my life
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usually me personally around seven, have some easy breakfast and then prep for your ride
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I usually leave training between nine and 10 and training takes quite some time
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So after breakfast it's time for the most important bit of the day, obviously the bike ride
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So all the riders have just come out of a briefing in their separate ride groups. They're all going to do different things and they've just been briefed
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on that. So some are doing lactate or bicarb testing, some are just doing some zone two
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endurance, some are doing some team time trial training. I thought it would be a good time to
3:00
come and show you the setup that they've got at a team training camp. So you've got various vans to
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help them get all the equipment and bikes and wheels and new helmets and they just had all their new team kit delivered so they all wearing that You got two mechanics trucks so this one is for the development team actually so they
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all training here together which means that there's a total of about 50 riders here just from Bahrain
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Victorious. So you've got the development team mechanics bus with all their bikes and wheels
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and then you've got the main team bus with all of their bikes and wheels including all their TT
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bikes that one's waiting for the new livery so that one's going to have Bianchi written on it
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very soon. The best thing about being a pro cyclist is that you always get to
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ride the best available equipment this I like the most those are the best things available to the
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market about yeah bike tech because I'm also a bike tech nerd so for me personally this is yeah
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Just how many bikes does the team actually have? So overall, we're touching about 450 bikes
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That is some money's worth. TT bikes over three teams. Yeah. Road bikes, obviously
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So we have a Devo team, like I said. We have a junior team in Belgium. And then it's my job to organize what frames and what material comes in
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who gets, obviously the big team is the priority. but how we arrange that is quite a complicated formula, I would say
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I'm now slightly scared to ask how many wheelsets you have. So wheelsets, I would need to do a calculation, I think it's about 400 again wheelsets
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Yeah, 400 carbon wheelsets. If you could choose one wheelset depth to race for the rest of your life, what depth would it be
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45 I think. 45. Most definitely 45. And if you could only choose one, steel spokes or carbon spokes
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No, carbon spokes, yeah. For me, all the way, yeah. I think the new RS wheels, especially the 45s, are really top-notch
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And, yeah, it's the best wheels I ever rode. So, yeah, for me, for sure, carbon spokes
5:27
After a good few hours through their 196km ride, one of the groups understandably pulled
5:44
into a filling station. However, it wasn't my usual order of a Lucozade or Mars bar on the menu, and rather today's
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mid-ride stop was for bicarb testing. So while some riders stripped off layers, other jumped into the back of the car, pricked
5:59
their fingers and provided blood samples to see whether their preloading of bicarb had
6:05
worn off. So bicarb is a lactate buffer with proven performance gains, but there is a very fine line between
6:12
riding faster and getting some quite bad gastrointestinal issues. So these camps are all about finding what works best for each individual rider stop some harder efforts in the mountains
6:38
What do you think is the most overlooked aspect of being a pro cyclist? I think it's quite hard to
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comprehend the sacrifice. The biggest sacrifice is probably the actual need to live as a weird
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lonely guy who needs to ride his bike all day. So that's the time spent away from your
7:00
loved ones and all the social gatherings that you need to say no to and all those things
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are probably the biggest sacrifice. If you could change one thing about being a pro cyclist, what would it be
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I think maybe less stress in the bunch when we race. More respect and less stress
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And like this less crush and yeah, just this I think. Right, well, the riders are back from their ride
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and while some of the world tour team have gone out to try their TT bikes because they've got to
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make sure they're all right before tomorrow's team time trial practice I've seen quite a lot
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of the development team going into here so let's go and see what they're up to some of this I assume
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so over in the far corner they're doing some physiological testing and then here
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they've got a bike fitting setup with a full retool setup so they're putting little tabs on
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all the joints and important bits and then they measure the positions of the bike so that hopefully
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they can be comfortable and fast so this one's about to get going
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Now you might be asking why are the riders having a bike fit when they've just got back from riding
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said bikes and yeah fair enough good question the truth is the riding just doesn't stop and there's
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a lot of riders to get fitted so the team staff managed to get all the world tour team fitted
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during the december camp on both their road bikes and their time draw bikes but now it's time for
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the development team riders so this is particularly important this year as the teams have new bikes
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for the season they've moved from merida to bianchi the contact points of the bike are transferred
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onto the computer using this tool and then these patches on each joint log the movement of the rider
9:05
as they ride. The physiologists and sports scientists and then look at all the angles
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the knee flexion, the toe dip, the hip angle for example and combine this with rider input to get
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not only as efficient as possible but also comfortable because it turns out that is quite
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important when you're riding 30 hours a week. The biggest change that has happened with the bike tech and wheel tech in particular
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is probably these brakes that enabled wheel manufacturers to have more freedom in designing the rim I think it enabled the rim to be wider more aero also lighter
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because there's no need to be able to take in the demands of the actual braking
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I think wheels now are incomparable to what they were just a few years ago
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Even with Vision, the SL wheels were good, but now this year with the RS wheels
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they are even lighter, even stiffer. you really feel a huge difference between the old and the new wheels
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It's really evolved and I think it will continue evolving in the future. I think we're still not quite sure how wide is the best balance
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between rolling resistance, comfort and weight. So it's an ongoing research and I think a lot of time and effort
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and money has been put into it and I think it's still a race that's ongoing
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These camps are all about trialing new tech, and the next day we spotted Mohoric using a different Vision wheelset to every other rider on the team
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It turns out that these are the gravel wheels with a wider 25mm internal width, on which he's got 32mm tyres
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He's going to be trialing those before the Spring Classics. Anyway, we got distracted by the bikes whilst the team had a strength and conditioning session, and before you knew it, it was time for dinner
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Once again, there was a team-only buffet and lots of food weighing, an abundance of rice
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and whilst there was no alcohol, the riders were allowed pud. Actually, everyone was very well behaved
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even the team staff, the visiting sponsors and team guests refrained from a beer
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It really is amazing that you're going to have such a high-performance environment
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just down the coast from Benidorm. I aim to have dinner quite early, before 8 if possible
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and then it's time to wind down before sleep. I aim to go sleep before 10 o'clock if possible
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And how many hours sleep do you try and get there? To be okay, usually I need nine hours of sleep
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But if I can get more, then the better. If I get less than nine hours, then it's not going to be..
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I need to get more sleep. The Tour de France is often called a traveling circus
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but we forget that the show doesn't just happen. Behind every otherworldly performance are years of silent preparation
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For a team like Bahrain Victorious, the logistics don't stop when the finish line is crossed
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It's a 365-day grind by hundreds of riders and staff, winter camps and a relentless calendar that demands months away from home
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We're all too familiar with seeing the victory salutes. We don't see the sacrifice that it takes to earn the right to stand there
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I think after spending this time with the team, I certainly have a newfound appreciation
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of the scale of a world tour team. And for professional cyclists
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well, I don't think the greatest challenge are the mountains in front of them, and rather the discipline that it takes
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to show up day in, day out, before the world is even watching
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A big thanks to Vision for making this happen and to the Bahrain Victorious team
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for giving us access. If you like this kind of content, then please give it a like
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subscribe to the channel for lots more bike stuff, and we'll see you next time
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