ALL THE SYSTEMS. ALL THE TIME.

Your body generates cycling energy through multiple different systems. But what are they, how do they interact, and how can you turbo-charge all of them? Nick Busca finds out

- Nick Busca

With 300 metres to go, the DeceuninckQuick Step team played its trump card. It was stage 10 of last year’s Tour de France: a warm September day in Île de Ré, an island connected to the west coast of France by the windy Pont de Ré. Danish lead-out man Michael Mørkøv clicked up a couple of gears and launched a sprint for his team-mate, Ireland’s Sam Bennett. Behind Bennett, both the Australian Caleb Ewan and the then green jersey, Slovakia’s Peter Sagan, leapt into hot pursuit. It was too late: Bennett had already pounced. Despite Ewan and Sagan’s best efforts, there was no catching the Irishman.

To be able to launch such a devastating sprint at the end of a 168km stage, Bennett had to follow a multi-pronged strategy: he needed to stay hidden in the bunch and save energy; his team had to execute the attack with surgical precision; but most importantly, he needed an exceptional combination of fitness characteristics. First, he needed to be able to churn out enough steady power, hour after hour, to stay with the bunch. At the finish, he needed to press ‘fire’ on his world-class sprint, confident it had not been blunted by the day’s huge workload. In this feature, we’re going to examine what it takes for a rider like Bennett to pull off that type of win, and we’re going to do so by taking an in-depth look at the body’s energy systems – the processes going on in all of us every time we ride.

ATP: the master molecule