The professional peloton, like many other groups from other sports or any social field, sometimes moves by fashion. A few years ago, Peter Sagan began to eat a bag of sweets when he reached the finish line, and suddenly, gummy bears were circulating around the races in the backpacks of the assistants. Another: Tadej Pogacar likes to have an orange Fanta when he finishes a race, and his trusted assistant awaits him with a can of soda, which he drinks before getting on the podium (almost always), or when he doesn’t. . And Fanta, an invention of Nazi Germany to replace Cocacola, is one of the most sought after drinks. As if talent could be drunk by mouth or power increased like the VAT on sweets, as denounced by Mariano Rajoy, always concerned about cyclists.
The latest fashion is also focused on a seemingly simple product like a candy or a Fanta. What’s in now is baking soda, that white powder you take with water for heavy digestion, sprinkle on your toothbrush to whiten your teeth, or use for stubborn stains. Baking soda, yes, in gel form, is being made fashionable by Jumbo Visma, the team led by Jonas Vingegaard, the last winner of the Tour and the main star of Itzulia, the Tour of the Basque Country, which begins in Vitoria on Monday and ends on Saturday in Eibar after six stages and a single climb finish.
“We have noticed that the power in sprints of 20 or 30 seconds is greater with baking soda,” says Mathieu Heijboer, the performance director of the Jumbo team. “Runners are more tolerant of the lactic acid that is produced during these intense efforts. That’s why they love it!” Baking soda, as it happens in heavy digestion, reduces the negative effects of the energy gels that cyclists consume: “We just used something that people had trouble consuming for decades and eliminated all of its possible negative effects.”
However, for the Jumbo’s rivals, it’s just a matter of business. “I think it’s marketing, a kind of bluff,” says Patrick Lefevere, patron of Soudal to Cyclingnews. “I know what it feels like to be a winning team. Before the blues were ahead and everyone trembled. Now it’s the other way around.”
In the other teams they also think that it is a commercial strategy of the Swedish company Maurten, which sponsors the Jumbo team. “In fact, Vingegaard does not take bicarbonate and he won the last Tour,” they point out. Almost all the riders on the team take the gel with bicarbonate of soda. Primoz Roglic started using it in 2021, but the Tour winner doesn’t. “It is a personal decision. He decides for himself”, they replied from the sports group to the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet, which was interested in the issue.
In fact, Vingegaard distances himself from many of the methods and customs of other cyclists who are at the top of world cycling. After winning the Tour and dealing with the splendor that comes with it, he moved away from the spotlight, trained in Spain, competed little and focused on the following season. After riding O Gran Camiño and Paris-Nice, in which he finished third, he will compete in Itzulia at Easter and then only the Dauphine before reaching the Tour.
In the Basque Country, he is expected to be the great favourite, although cyclists such as the Frenchman David Gaudu (Groupama) will also appear, or the winner of the previous edition, Daniel Felipe Martínez, accompanied by his compatriot Egan Bernal, also winner of the Tour, but that after his very serious accident seems to have gone down a step. Together with them, Enric Mas (Movistar), in his eternal task of vindicating himself among the greats, the Yates brothers or the Bilbao-Landa couple in Bahrain.
All in a winding race, with only one finish uphill, in the third stage ending on the Amasa wall, in Billabona, and which will not have the usual climax of the climb to Arrate nor will it have a time trial stage. It will be the 62nd edition of a test that was organized for the first time by the sports newspaper Excelsior in 1924, and which was then won by Francis Pelissier, one of the convicts described in his chronicles by the journalist Albert Londres.
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