Being a professional cyclist is about more than how many watts you can produce. There are many amateurs who can produce similar power numbers to the pros when fresh, but matching the world’s best when fatigued? That’s a different story altogether.
To be successful at the highest levels of the sport, you need to be able to produce world-class numbers over and over again, even as your fatigue builds up after several hours of hard racing. Indeed, more than ever before, athletes, coaches, and researchers are focused on fatigue resistance as an important element of cyclist success.
Which is why a new study from researchers out of the UK, Spain, Denmark, and Italy is particularly intriguing. Published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, this paper suggests that the legal use of a common asthma drug can improve fatigue resistance when it comes to sprints at the end of bike races. And not just by a little: we’re talking about a roughly 10% increase in peak power when fatigued.
Let’s set the scene a little.
Salmeterol and friends
There’s a group of drugs called β2-agonists that are commonly used to provide relief for those with asthma or exercise-induced bronchoconstriction (EIB – once known as exercise-induced asthma). You’ve probably heard of at least one of those β2-agonists: salbutamol – the drug at the centre of “adverse analytical findings” for Chris Froome in 2017 (he was later cleared of any wrongdoing), and Alessandro Petacchi in 2007 (Petacchi was ultimately banned).
Salbutamol is one of only four specific β2-agonists that the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Code allows athletes to use, and even then, only at specific doses:
- salbutamol (≤1,600 micrograms (μg) in a 24-hour period, ≤600 μg in an eight-hour period)
- salmeterol (≤200 μg in a 24-hour period)
- formoterol (≤54 μg in a 24-hour period)
- vilanterol (≤25 μg in a 24-hour period).
Based on guidelines from the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and others, it is assumed that the use of these drugs within the specified limits shouldn’t have any performance-enhancing effects. And for the most part that’s been corroborated by various studies over the years. For example, a 2020 paper by Norwegian researchers showed that β2-agonists don’t affect aerobic performance in non-asthmatic subjects regardless of which drug is used, how large the dose is, how it’s administered, how long it’s administered for, or how strong the riders are. But when it comes to anaerobic performance (short, intense efforts where the body’s demands outpace the available oxygen supply – like a bunch sprint, say) things get a little more complicated.
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