BARCELONA –
“This sport is just so completely weird to anyone who is not a hardcore fan,” that was the assessment of Joe Lindsey, Escape Collective Managing Editor, of four Netcompany-Ineos riders sitting in the team time trial start house, eyes hidden behind their Daft Punk-esque visored TT helmets, each with their forearms and hands dunked in a large Tupperware box of ice and water. The press room reaction was more of a “WTF is going on.”
It’s a fair question. Icy plunge pools behind the team bus have become something of a norm as teams optimise their post-stage recovery routines, but pre-team time trial?
Long story short, the Netcompany riders are doing what has come to be known in performance circles as “pre-cooling,” one of the latest examples of thermal-management performance interventions at the highest level of the sport since Dan Bigham and Filippo Ganna set back-to-back Hour Records in 2022 using the technique (Bigham, who is now with Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, assisted in Ganna's record when both were at Ineos).
Ronan Mc Laughlin
It’s effectively an extension of the warm-up cooling protocols teams use with ice vests and misting fans teams use ahead of time trials, and a last-minute chance to mitigate the effects of overheating, which can prove catastrophic for performance. All that makes sense, but it doesn't explain why this is the first time we're seeing the forearm dunk.
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