Weekend Edition: Tour de France - what does it take to conquer the world's toughest race?

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast. The biggest bike race in the world starts this weekend, the Tour de France. We're talking climbing up to five and a half thousand metres, parting seas of fans who get right up close and trying to eat 9000 calories a day for three weeks. We're going to be joined by the winner of last year's women's Tour de France, Kasia Niewiadoma, to tell us the story of that dramatic finale. She won the 950 kilometre race by just four seconds. We'll also have a look back at the best bits from this week's shows. Welcome to The Sports Agents.

0:45The Sports Agents with Gabby Logan and Mark Chapman. So this is a special edition and going forwards, it'll be how the weekend edition of the Sports Agents looks, Chappas, because not only will we review what we've done in the episodes, we'll have an extra bit of content for you. Yeah, and that extra bit of content this weekend will be all about the Tour de France with the men's race starting, the women's starts at the end of July. But we'll still have those best bits, as Gabby said, which this week includes. A football podcast, essentially, didn't we? With Julien Laurent and Dan Cook, who is from the HLTCO Palace fan channel, talking about what is going on with Crystal Palace's potential emission from European football next season.

1:30After winning the FA Cup, of course, the fans got all excited. Europa League football, here we come. But because of multi-club ownership and the complications that ensue from that, they may well find themselves sidelined. I won't explain all of this now because you'll hear a bit more of it later on. But the overriding feeling when we spoke to those two and reading more about this story is just how unfair it feels for Palace fans. Yeah. God, if we're adding bonus content to the weekend episode, the last thing we need to be doing is trying to explain the Crystal Palace-Leon Europa League debacle.

2:04With Crystal Palace, it has always felt, even more so in recent years, as though you are butting your head up against the glass ceiling because the idea of winning a domestic cup was just something I never even contemplated. We got to the final in 16 against United and we lost that. Every year it gets harder. So for us to go through in the fashion that we did against all the odds, really, going to Fulham in the quarterfinal, going to take on Aston Villa, a Champions League knockout team in the semis, beating Manchester City with a clean sheet in the final. It was like a fever dream in and of itself.

2:31To then have that taken away from you would just reinforce that feeling for everybody, from the boardroom to the players, to the coaches, to the fans, that isn't for us. And I understand that people will say, well, you should have got your house in order, but we didn't have a crystal ball. You know, there is a higher chance that the two clubs wouldn't have been in the same competition. The one I prefer, the best one, I think, is that he also owns Botafogo as well as a bit of Crystal Palace and Lyon and Molenbeek in Belgium. So he said to the French regulator, listen, I'm about to sell three players to Nottingham Forest for a lot of money from Botafogo to Nottingham Forest.

3:04I will take that money and transfer it straight away from the Botafogo account to the Lyon account. And in that way, no money problems anymore. It's just easy. And that's what we're going to do. And the DNC just said, listen, John, this is not how it works. You just can't transfer money from one account. This is not your common account and your saving accounts. It just doesn't work like this. So he struggled a little bit to understand that. And I just think there's, you know, when he stepped down from Lyon, he said there's a lot of things. I made mistakes and there's a lot of things I didn't understand on how European football in general and French football in particular was working.

3:38I just don't think it's even that. It's just common sense. So much drama in F1 at the moment as well. You've got Max Verstappen, will he leave Red Bull? Will he go to Mercedes? You've got the battle between Norris and Piastri at the top of the Drivers' Championship. You've got Lewis Hamilton and an underwhelming start to his Ferrari career. So ahead of the British Grand Prix, Jenson Button joined us to go through all of that. And Mark Pugach went to talk to McLaren's Zac Brown. Zac, let me just ask you one, if I may, about talking about great drivers and maybe people on the move. Max Verstappen may be moving on.

4:11Well, I'm a general believer of where there's smoke, there's fire. You know, no one's kind of denying anything. You know, if you said to Oscar and Lando or me, who's in the car at McLaren next year, it's 110 % Lando and Oscar. And we all say, so when you get into the, well, we've got a contract through 28, but yet no one's definitively saying, no, that's where I'm going to be. There's conversations clearly going on. I think Mercedes is a team on the rise. Red Bull at the moment has challenges. Doesn't mean that they can't fix those challenges, but Max in a Mercedes is pretty uncomfortable to think about because he's awesome and they're awesome and on the rise.

4:58So I think I'd rather him stay where he is. I think it would be a disaster for Red Bull if they lost Max because if you look at how that's all going, you could almost question whether the Alfa Tauri is a quicker car and Max is that special. So it's the fascinating part about Formula One. I'm glad we're able to watch and not participate in that because it'd have to be an uncomfortable position for Red Bull management to be in that, you know, their superstar driver, one of the best racing drivers in the world ever, who's clearly kind of carrying that car at the moment could leave and then what? It's fascinating times.

5:40I think we're going to know here shortly. The one thing I've learned with Formula One is expect the unexpected. So there could be something going on that none of us even know about. Catch up with all episodes of The Sports Agents on Global Player or wherever you get your podcasts. Hit subscribe or follow and don't forget to rate and review. First up, it's the winner of the 2024 Women's Tour de France, Cassia Nivedoma. The Sports Agents.

6:05the sports agents with gabby logan and mark chapman cassia thank you very much for for joining us you're actually in training camp at the moment are you yeah exactly i arrived two days ago so i'm gonna be staying in andorra for the next more or less three weeks and at this stage what are you looking for from a training camp i mean is this is this pushing yourself to the limit are you starting to taper off how does it work usually tapering starts like one week before the competition's first day i am building or rebuilding bigger base on which then i will be starting to add some intervals like the final sharpening intervals and then i do tapering so basically like my tour de france femme preparation started in May with like this massive training camp in Boulder, Colorado, where I was basically just making hours, like five, six hours a day.

7:04And then I did some racing. I rested from that. And now I kind of like sharpen what has been built so far. Everything I've read about last year and your incredible win in the Tour de France Femme by four seconds.

7:26This is going to be right on the limit now to win this Tour de France for Mavic Swift. Look at Kashi Niwe Doma go. Can she get across the line in time? Kashi Niwe Doma, it's going to be the matter of a few seconds. Is she going to do it? Kashi Niwe Doma now. She needs to get to the line now. Donnie's up. She's done it. Kashi Niwe Doma wins this Tour de France for Mavic Swift. Where you went mentally and physically in that race sounded horrific in terms of the physical pain and the dark kind of pain. You said you almost weren't sentient. You weren't conscious almost. When you know that's where you've got to go to win, how do you mentally kind of reframe it ahead of this year's race, knowing it might take that again?

8:15Yeah, I think it all starts with the fact that once you allow yourself or once together with your coach and the team, you get into a top shape. That's where you can start playing around because being in a shape that allows you to then push so deep that you just basically zone out, that you lose this base awareness around you. So that is always the goal during the training camp to do everything possible so you can train hard recover even harder and then your body naturally kind of gets to the stop shape and once you're there that's where you know that it's all about mental strength because if you're in a shape it's such a beautiful state because that's where you can really push hard that's where suffering feels a little different in comparison to when you're not in a shape it feels like it hurts you so much but somehow the muscles are aching in a different way so last year during the tour de France I was in a great shape and that allowed me in the last stage even though like I had a hard time 40ks 50ks to go to rebuild and be able still to just like push the hardest zones I've ever found myself in basically.

9:30Take us through that final day and what you were going through mentally but also because it's a team sport as well isn't it how your team helped you in those darkest moments. So this day definitely has a lot of stories that everyone shared with me I'm super happy that I was in a team car because they were basically losing their hair, you know, counting seconds, not knowing where are we at. Meanwhile, I was just completely zoned out. And I knew that all I have to do is arrive to the finish line. But on the last climb, I always need some sort of information, like you're looking good, you're coming closer, like this and that, like, how many k's to go.

10:20I like strict, plain information, less of like yelling some riders respond really well when you're just super hard on them uh they need to be yelled at they need to be like really motivated meanwhile i prefer just like a plain information so my team knows it very well and that's how they were guiding me throughout the stage to be honest while i was climbing up duess i just i was muted i couldn't hear anything there was so much noise coming from the side of the road because of course you have a lot of fans like yelling and just banging bells making so much noise then you have radio plugged into your ear and there's also talking meanwhile you're just like burly on the bike you know that you have to push as hard as you can so in that state you just get on an auto pilot mode and you push your best and it's not that you even think so much it hurts you so much that you just want to across the finish line.

11:22I only remember thinking that I just wanted to be finished. I remember not caring about anything. I just wanted that pain to stop. When you look back at your data from the race, are you able to see where your heart rate was going and where other biometric measures were? Can you tell us a little bit about what zone you were in? Yeah. Definitely with the power meter, with the heart rate monitor, we can track everything from the stage so I could see that on a climb before Alpe d 'Huez on Glendon due to lack of proper fueling I wasn't doing my best like the power wasn't as high I couldn't get high with my heart rate of course altitude affected that but so as lack of proper fueling and that is the mistake I made and sometimes I keep making and I need to work on that but then you could tell that like once I refreshed myself on a descent then on the last climb I was able to basically perform like the best climb of my whole life I was able to go like threshold and above for nearly one hour so after after racing for like eight stages that was the best performance I've ever had in my life where was your heart rate in that section then when you're a young younger rider when you're junior you can easily go over 200 because your body is fresh when you train for years and i've been professional for 11 years the heart rate the maximum heart rate lowers as your body is well trained so my max is like 187 maybe and i was like yeah in that zone in the last game are you talking about fueling there we're going to talk a little bit about nutrition later on and and what cyclists have to eat for doing for doing the tours or what they have to get into their body what during the stages would your calorie intake be and just give an indication of what you're eating as well so basically we focus on having depending on the stage if it's an easy stage where you know that the intensity will be low that it won't be too crazy we focus on like having around 70 to 90 grams of carbs an hour and when it's very intense you go from 120 to 130 grams of carbs an hour and you build it with like sports drinks with gels with bars with rice cakes rice krispies you have variety of different products and of course when you race for so many days like it's not that you get stoked about loading i don't know 10 gels a stage into yourself so I always find it very tricky to kind of like find a variety of foods that give me energy but also don't make me feel sick so like stage like al-du-es required us to be taking like around 120 grams of carbs an hour which I was doing great until gland on because on the gland on I only took like 20 grams it was only like one bottle but I know that I was just like fixated on not losing Demi's will or like not being surprised by her attack that even though I knew I had to fuel, I just ignored it because I thought that it would take energy out of me.

14:40So obviously it did take energy out of you, but then you say the effect of putting the energy back in gave you such enormous boost in the last stage. So will your sports scientists around you and your team say, look, trust us, you won't lose time. You'll actually gain time because of your energy? The problem is that sometimes I get to be very stubborn person. And even though people tell me what's best for me, what I should be doing, I somehow avoid it. And that was definitely the race that I realized that I cannot longer be playing that stupid game, you know. And this is something that my coach is very hard on me with that like anytime we train longer climbs or longer efforts.

15:23It's like always with a capital letter, take one gel, drink one bottle, like fuel, just so I learn how to, because, you know, I feel like I always struggled that if you go really hard and your breathing is fast and your heart rate is high, drinking bottle or taking a gel takes your breath away. So I always felt like it was kind of ruining my flow, but you can train anything. and that's what I've been focusing on. How does the tour compare to other endurance races for women? I mean we talk about your experience and training and so on and so forth but when you actually get there and do it how different is it to other races that you will be competing in?

16:07Yeah you definitely feel the power of the race through media's attention through so many people coming out to see us not only at the start and the finish line but along the course especially when you hit really iconic climbs that's where a massive amount of people are coming out and it's like different ages either kids older people female male like everyone wants to watch us and it doesn't happen on a daily basis that you raise and you have so many families along the road so that is definitely special and just the amount of media around the race it's like not the matter of one two interviews but it's like 10 lined up and then you choose who you want to talk to or who you could talk to it's always interesting because like my husband he's an ex-pro and he was always telling me that the tour is a very special race but i could not understand it you only understand it once you're in the bubble once you're there and you feel like like, oh, wow, it's like everything is vibrating.

17:13Everything is like fully on. Every single team wants to have a little five seconds moment in the race so they're visible, so their sponsors are happy. So it's like people are fighting not only for the GC, for the stage victory, but just for visibility. And that makes race super hard and very fast. The women's race, which starts, the scheduling is quite weird, isn't it? Because the men's race finishes on the 27th and the women's starts on the 26th. So there's a little overlap there. But at least for cycling fans, they don't have to go too long before they can witness more climbing and more incredible racing.

17:47But the women's stages are nine to the men's 21. This is a relatively new Tour de France femme. And there's been different ways of doing it, hasn't there, over the years. Do you feel they've got it right now, this version of the Tour de France for women? I think that the race is still in development process. I don't believe that this is the edition that will be repeated forever. It feels like each year either we are having extra additional harder climb or harder stage and it just feels like the race is still growing. I definitely don't see it as the end, as something that riders will be racing in 10 years time.

18:25Would you want more stages? Yeah, I think so. I think it would be great to have the Tour de France that say has two weeks. It doesn't have to be three weeks long. It's not that we have to follow step by step what guys are doing out there, but just like having our own addition that is equally challenging and racing for two weeks also requires like so much effort and logistic things that the team will have to invest in. But definitely it would be great to have something unique to this race. We used to race Giro Rosa for 10 days and that was like the longest stage race back then. So having extra four stages, I guess, because it's also, you know, it's not that like the mother, either we can do it or not, because the reality is that like each rider sits on the bike.

19:16I don't know, like 240 days a year, you know, so we can ride every day. We can race every day. It's just the mother, like how to make it exciting and more appealing for the fans and for the audience. You've described there that final day and how unbelievably difficult it was. I think 21 hairpin bends that day, 14k and 8 % gradient. That's very different to the men's final day, which is a procession into Paris, which is pretty much, you know, the yellow jersey's already won and it's a lovely kind of champagne filled day. If it did get tweaked, would you quite like that? Would it have been nice to have had that moment on your final day?

19:54I think so yeah because to be honest when I look back at last year's edition I definitely miss having more time to celebrate with the team because the race finished quite late and it's not that you finish the race and you're like with your team celebrating because there are things you have to follow up with like of course podium but then doping control press conference interviews like there are so many things that take up a lot of time so by the time I got back to a bus it was already I don't know like 9 p.m the next morning everyone was leaving so it was just like yeah quickly celebrate like what are we doing you know but we definitely missed like having this like moment all together and let's soak it up because I think it took me like two weeks to actually realize what what had happened.

20:44Cassia thank you very much for coming on go well in the in the tour I was gonna say enjoy it but I don't know if that's the right is that is that the right phrase or not? I can promise you I will do my best to enjoy it. Well, you always seem to race with a smile on your face. So it looks, maybe that's just the way you're controlling the pain. I need to take a leaf out of your book. Have a fantastic time. Thank you so much. Thank you for the conversation. Next, here's our chat about the physical toll and crazy eating habits of the men's tour. That's with ex-pro cyclist Adam Blythe and Nigel Mitchell, the leading voice in pro cycling nutrition, helping Team Sky to win multiple tours.

21:20The Sports Agents The Sports Agents With Gabby Logan and Mark Chapman Well with us on the pod former pro cyclist Adam Bly the nutritionist Nigel Mitchell just before we started recording Nigel you were just full of praise for Adam and his work, is that because you feel guilty because you nearly once chopped his hand off in a blender I take no responsibility for that at all but I do have really fond memories of Adam, I think must have been 17 years of age in Manchester in the cyclist houses he always brought a lot of let's say colour and fun and excitement that's a good way to put it Nigel, thank you do you want to tell the story about how you nearly lost your hand in a blender not particularly no, let's just say it wasn't one of my finest moments, we'll leave it at that I know obviously you've just come off the back of the Giro and there was great success there for Simon Yates and there are many, many bike races through a season.

22:26But is this for you a bit like Christmas Eve when you're on the precipice of the Tour? It is, yeah. It is just a bike race, but it's the biggest bike race in the world by far. You know, you've got all eyes watching it, just people watching because it's in France and seeing the scenery and everything. But it's the fact that the Tour de France brings in roughly 80 % of the sponsors' marketing. So everything is thrown at this Tour de France in terms of where the money comes from. So for that, you've got to have the riders in the best form, which we always generally get, bar crashes or anything. So yeah, for me, this is, it's a phenomenal three weeks and I look forward to it from quite a long way out.

23:02And this year, I think it's going to be one of the best ones we get, hopefully. Why? Tadej Pogacar. Obviously, Tadej's Tadej. He's exceptional, probably the greatest bike rider that's ever lived.

23:27And he's jack of all trades. He can sprint, he can climb, he can go on the attack, he can find himself a way around the peloton without his team necessarily. But very different to the one big opponent he's got against him is Jonas Vingego. Jonas Vingego to me is a pure Tour de France rider. This whole season for him is built around just the Tour de France. anything else is a bonus so for me the preparation that he's done for it is very different to what Tade does but he is more of a he's more of a pure climber I would say the big mountains the long mountains that's when he'll really come into his own and the time trials as well so I think with those two as they are now in the best form not with any crashes hopefully they won't have any crashes either going against each other with these very different styles of racing is what makes this entertaining let's talk a little bit about the climbs and and what it takes in in terms of your body and how much you have to put into your body nigel because this blew my mind uh having just done a little ride through the wicklow hills where i climbed 1250 meters and thought i was like i basically thought it's not bad but i had a regular listeners to the podcast will know that whatever sport we talk about, whoever we have on, Gabby compares it to, or we both do at times, but Gabby in particular compares herself to elite athletes in her own little amateur way.

24:48To get that feeling of what they're doing. And when I read, one of the stages is five and a half thousand metres. So they're climbing thousands of metres every day on average. It just blows my mind about what you need to put in your body because I don't want to eat when I feel like, you know, I'm on that kind of an exercise programme how do you how do you get the calories into them nigel because and tell us what how much they need to eat it varies from stage to stage and now there's so much monitoring around the metrics of energy use of riders and the amount of nutritional input at the tour de france now is incredible where very quickly they're able to assess the work that a rider has done in the day and then very quickly look to make sure that the calories are there to get the energy balance to be really honest with you in something like the tour de france the riders are either sleeping eating or riding the bike and so the opportunities for them to eat is incredible does it matter what you eat is i mean is it is it just get the food in no i mean what we're wanting to do it's not just about calories it's the overall nutrition as well so we understand it's not just a case it's it's big max for breakfast but typically most riders will start with the breakfast with something like a three egg omelet there'll be porridge uh there'll be jam there'll be bread there'll be meats a lot of it will depend on the stage what they're doing so on a mountain stage then they might be going a little bit lower fiber so there's less uh let's call it fecal mass in the in the gut that that just keeps that that weight down a little bit but once they finish the breakfast then they quite often they'll go up to the uh the soigneurs room the carers room where there's more food available there so they might top up then and then when they're on the bus on the way to the start of the race it's coffees and there's bars and snacks on the bus and one of the things that's changed a lot since Adam's time it's changed very quickly is the amount of calories that the riders are now consuming on the bike so even a few years ago you'd be looking at maybe 68 grams of carbohydrate per hour whereas now it's pretty much double that some riders are going up to 140 grams of carbohydrate per hour but even so it's still within the peloton it's not just gels and drinks there's still solid foods there so some of the teams still use things like rice cakes that we developed or they still might have some paninis little sandwiches or they might have bars as well so it's not just gels but when the guys are going flat stick then it is coming more from the liquid we all know what it's like after you've had a big breakfast without turning it back to my own experiences when you leave breakfast as a cyclist are you meant to feel full yeah so what you're not wanting is people that are feeling really pumped you're wanting people to feel that they've had a substantial meal but not not that they can't walk because they're gonna have to ride the bike but normally breakfast is about three to four hours before they'll be racing so that really gives time to get most of that food digested and throughout throughout the system and and when people get to the race and some of the nerves are kicking in and they've had a couple of coffees then they'll go to the toilet so so the digestive system but her speeds up in itself Adam it's a it's a long way isn't it from the early Tour de France is where they popped into cafes and that was well more up my street I wish they still did that now imagine pulling over a little glass of wine off you go how did how did you feel Adam when you were having to take on board those levels of calories and that quantity of food well when I was racing it was just before this has really become it's quite recent that all these carbs have been chucked into drinks and gels more when i was racing it was still very much you'd you'd have your porridge you'd have your chicken your rice in the evenings all those kind of stuff which we know is good for you and then we'd have as niger was saying a few more carbs and your gels but i was right on the end of that before it really took off so when i was racing it was eat as much as you can to sustain your energy and you'd roughly have a good idea but it wasn't as scientific then so the main problem when I was riding is not to feel full because you get so bloated sometimes and you'd stomach food down and the gels back then were I don't know if you've had a gel but it's basically like just having a bag of snot with a bit of flavor in it it's not nice at all like it does the job and they they make your tummy a bit gripey don't they for some reason yeah they're not the reason for that is that a lot of the gels have got a lot of additional additives in them like citric acid and things like this so what a lot of the teams are using now are things like gels and drinks that are very very very very simple you know a lot of them are flavorless they're not having the same chemicals in them and there's nothing wrong if people are just having one or two of these but if people are having you know 12 in a in a race then they have to be really simple the other thing i mean so much work's gone into improving the quality of the food and all of the teams now have their own chef most of them have got restaurant trucks it is unbelievable I mean that that is the other thing as well though Adam in all of this I mean we're in a very lucky position where we have interviewed pro cyclists and stood next to pro cyclists and there really is nothing of them you know in all of the in all of this in all this talking about food and and nutrition and calories and intake and stuff there is nothing of them there's literally not i think like it's three four five percent body fat and maybe even less for a few riders it is right on the limit of being ill there's no other way about it so they are right on the cuss so what they put into their bodies they really need to manage because i've always said it about pro cyclists men and women if you go in a room full of athletes like the olympics in the food hall you can generally pick out who is an athlete as bike rider they just look ill they don't look like a sports person at all they just they could be a marathon runner or a cyclist That's basically the only two.

30:49They are just the most jawn people. One of the things I just wanted to say on the nutrition and how that's changed and bring Adam in as well is what we've seen over the last few years, the style of racing has changed. And one of the reasons why the style has changed, where it's becoming much faster, more explosive, is because we've got this modern technology around feeding more carbohydrate. So at one time, riders would be good for maybe, you know, support riders really working out on one mountain. But because of the way that they're feeding now, they're able to do this sort of a two three four mountains so that's again adam that's coming over the last few years yeah i think traditionally the way we saw a bike race in the past it was very much we didn't really see the start of the bike race that was the main thing for me is because it wasn't shown on tv but you'd have the breakaway and that could take up to two hours to go once that had gone you'd get the peloton really slowing down and focusing on the final climb in the tour de saint france and now we have the first climb the second climb the third climb being ridden not at maximum but a very very hard tempo so riders will do a tour de france stage a hard mountain stage and for anyone maybe let's say top 20 maybe top 30 on that stage for that five hours maybe five and a half hours at the racing in the tour their heart rates will probably average around 150 160 for that full five hours in the past it would probably be around 130 but it would It'd just be that last hour of racing where it would be up around the maximum.

32:16Whereas now it's just so hard for such a long time. But as Nye said, you can get the nutrition in so you can keep going that hard for that amount of time. So it's just all about... So they average over the four hours, 150, 160 now, do they? I'd say on a hard day, yeah, quite easily, yeah. And these are athletes whose resting heart rate would come down to what? 30. Wow. What was yours on your road? I think I averaged 180. That is the crazy thing with it. You know, like Tadej Pogacar, for example, he's put up a few stats before, and he's been able to do with the final climb in a Tour de France for literally 45 minutes, one hour at 180, which is impressive in itself.

33:04But then if you put the other four hours in before that, which is averaged around 140, and you're like how the heck is that possible to do that but as nige said nutrition is a bit of a freak of nature let's be honest but yeah the nutrition plays a massive part in it and whilst those are obviously individual stats and he's a really impressive individual and that's probably an understatement adam you can't win this on your own no the tour de france you need a team around you and that's it if you're going for gc even if you're trying to win a stage you do have the odd breakaway day maybe five days out of the whole tour where a breakaway will succeed you'll still need your team to help you maybe getting that breakaway and the support from your staff as well not just the riders but in terms of winning this tour de france general classification you have seven other riders in support of you and all seven of those riders are dedicated to helping that one single person so we talk about the calories etc but the other side of that is sheltering in the bunch keeping them as fresh as possible so if you're behind one of your teammates for a certain period of time and they're taking more wind for you so you're getting the draft effect that causes you to burn less calories you're not putting as much effort and if you can do that from day one which they'll have to do up until stage 21 it'll save an enormous amount of energy but it's it's the tour de france for me where every little acceleration every little extra bit of energy to use you will eventually start to pay for so you really have to be careful with how you use your team how you use your own individual efforts what you're doing in the hotel what time you go to bed what time you're going down to bed or every single thing is looked down to down to the finest of margins the fine margins there in terms of sleep and how you sleep and you know the circumstances in which you're you know kind of traveling all that stuff is it's incredible and so many other sports have have taken so much from the tour de France we spoke to Iriola on the podcast and he was a huge fan of the tour and of cycling generally one of the other things i'd just like to bring in about the tour as well and again adam will be there as a commentator is what we've not really spoken about is the stress that's on everybody at the tour with it being that that event i remember when brad were winning the tour in 2012 and we're out there the the stress on the rider who was on the podium there's an extra couple of hours a day that's added on them before they can do anything i remember when through me were in yellow and he won on montmonton and trume's gone he's gone oh this is glorious kicks away and said this mountain is mine this jersey is mine this tour de france belongs to me that's the message he sent and i were at the team hotel and everybody had fed and then Chris comes in and he's still in his cycling kit what he'd been racing on.

35:54So he's all covered in dust and snot. And that will be, you know, so that was like three, four hours after the end of the race. So the pressure is unbelievable. If you're going to win, you've got to take on all those other duties that the day gives you. And that obviously leads to even more stress, as you point out. It's going to be amazing. And we love the coverage that you do, Adam. It's fantastic. You talking on the motorbike to the riders, that communication. You said it's the final week you'll be out there doing that can't wait to see it thank you yeah i'm looking forward to it although i can't i got a real telling off last time for talking to riders i'm not supposed to do it but if they if they come to me they come to me i can't do anything about it exactly it'll be good fun apart from going down those hills that is the one bit i'm like i'm out i'm out i don't like doing it at all thank you both for coming thank you so much Thank you guys.

36:42Thank you. So we hope that bonus content helps you enjoy the tour a little bit more. That's it for this week. If you're enjoying the episode on the News Agents feed, just search for The Sports Agents to listen to this week's episodes in full Global Player or wherever you get your podcasts for that. Get in touch either on our socials or on email, thesportsagentsatglobal.com. New episodes every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. The Sports Agents with Gabby Logan and Mark Chapman.

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