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Tour de France
I spend most of my time at the Tour de France looking at riders’ handlebars. It’s sorta my thing. Back many years ago we started seeing teams add stickers on rider handlebars with details of the upcoming stage, notably the elevation profile, sprints, etc…. These days, that’s commonplace, and almost every team uses them, so much so that I think the Tour de France actually provides the stickers now. Every once in a while we’ll see some creative variants, but they’re virtually all identical, as seen below.
Certainly, most popular GPS bike computers are capable of displaying the upcoming elevation profile, and some can also display waypoints. None can emulate the look of that ‘entire view with waypoints’ look though, at least to my knowledge. Perhaps there’s a random Connect IQ app out there, or something else that can do it. But for the most part, it’s all about the elevation profile, not the extra bits of useful data. Here’s a custom-colored Wahoo BOLT V2 on Team EF, and a custom-sticker Garmin Edge 840 on Movistar – both with the elevation profile stickers on the handlebars.
Tour de France
And the thing is, the elevation profile sticker is simply super practical in the Tour the France. It’s always there, and never on a ‘different page’. When you’re out there for 4-5 hours, it provides a quick at-a-glance look at the stage, and virtually all riders would have current distance on their bike computers (if not simply know it from recent markers or terrains/towns). Even if bike computer brands emulate it exactly, it’d have to still be in an always-on config to mirror that same level of ‘functionality’. That could be done along the top/bottom, but of course at the expense of screen real estate.
But again, that’s mostly all old news. You can even find companies that make your own stickers for your upcoming events/racers/etc.
However, at this year’s Tour de France, I saw something I’d never seen before: A team with an additional nutrition sticker. While looking at Team Lotto Dstny, I noticed from afar that the stickers didn’t look like the regular elevation profile ones, but rather, were listing times and nutrition intake. The team is sponsored by Precision Hydration for nutrition products, and the stickers all naturally listed Precision Hydration products (disappointingly, the stickers did not list Haribo, M&M’s, or ice cream). Here is a look at Caleb Ewan’s on the 182km Stage 1:
Tour de France
You can see not just chews vs gels, but caffeine ones vs not, and even the water bottles are labeled differently (yellow vs not).
As I look at different bikes set up next to the team bus, each rider (named at the top), had a different nutrition plan. Here are all the nutrition plans for the 209km Stage 2, which was a warm and mostly overcast day, but not crazy-hot.
Once I saw the stickers in the Tour de France, I had so many questions. The first of which was “Did some poor person manually create these using the world’s most complicated Excel sheet?”. Especially when you realize there are different products in there, and each one has the correct image/icon for it. For examplen in the Tour de France, the gels with caffeine show the correct image which always has a golden stripe across it (in the case of Precision Hydration’s lineup anyway). And I think that’s actually what stood out to me the most, and differentiates this from how most bike computers work.
See, you can add hydration and nutrition alerts on Garmin devices, which the team is sponsored by (details on which devices the 2023 Tour de France riders are using here). And the same is true of Wahoo too. And while Wahoo’s is more customizable than Garmin’s, neither can show the actual gel packets for which ones to take (e.g., caffeine vs not, or gel A vs gel B). And sometimes, when you’re 4-5 hours into a ride on a hot day, or a hard day, you just need simplicity. It’s very clever. And in the case of both Garmin and Wahoo, it’s generally about repeating nutrition/hydration alerts (e.g., every 20 mins), not about specific ones at specific times (just once). Sure, you can kinda hack around those limitations with other custom alerts/options, but it’s very messy. But Wahoo at least allows you to add emoji: Tour de France
I don’t know why I found this particular sticker so cool, but I did. Perhaps it’s because both myself and my wife have been using the Precision Hydration stuffs this past year for our races (including mine a bit over a month ago), and thus I was familiar with the whole “Wait, which type/color of gel and when, and how does that shift over the race?” There are plenty of good reasons why a nutrition plan (from any vendor) might vary the products throughout a longer endurance race. Or vary mediums (gel vs chews vs drinks). I’m not going to get into that here, mostly because that’s out of the scope of things I write about or have detailed knowledge on. Suffice it to say, coaches/athletes/nutritionists have many different ways to get the athlete to the finish line.
Instead, I wanted answers on how these silly stickers were actually created for the Tour de France. Was this some special app? Was this Excel? Did she hire people on Fiverr? I needed to know. After asking around a bunch at the team bus one morning earlier this week pre-stage, I was pointed in the direction of the “sticker lady”, who is the team’s nutritionist Britt Lambrecht. At the time, she was finishing putting bottles on bikes heading out for the stage shortly.
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2023/07/tour-de-france-tidbits-sticker-tech.html