Cheat sheet for Matthew van der Poel during Ronde: Not the slopes, but a detailed feeding schedule

The staff at CyclingTips noticed this and let Christoph de Kegel, performance director at Alpecin-Fenix, talk about it. “In such a long sprint where you have to produce energy for more than six hours, your nutrition plan is critical,” says de Kegel. “Timing and amount are very important. When I explain it to passengers, I compare it to sleep. If you miss two hours of sleep, you won’t get it back.”

“We make a table of how many carbohydrates a rider should consume in an hour,” De Kegel continues. “If you eat or drink very little in the first hour, you will pay for it in the fourth, fifth and/or sixth hour of the race. We have a lot of riders who have a nutrition plan on the label and we have been using that for a while.”

What does a rider do in such a difficult race? According to De Kegel, Van der Poel ate about 100 to 120 grams of carbs per hour during his Flanders Tour. This is in the form of gels, bars, rice cakes, energy drinks…and after the race a well-deserved hamburger followed.

On the label we see four different icons. The circles would probably be rice cakes (three pieces), energy bar rectangles (five pieces), water bottles to the right of the note with different energy drinks and water (eight pieces) and then jelly in the center of the note (seven pieces). To be clear, this is how we explain it. and smile? It is said to represent a caffeine jelly.

According to De Kegel, Van der Poel got real starvation at the World Cup in 2019 – when he became 41st. Then he probably ran around without a feeding table on his leg. “If you saw what happened to Matthew in Harrogate, he had very little food and drink there. We should avoid such things.”