Chris Froome has said
racing has become more dangerous because teams’ directeurs have access to such
detailed information about the courses “from apps like VeloViewer” and then issue
instructions to riders in real time via race radios.
The four-time Tour de France winner said the result was a “scurry” forward in the peloton, and the speed increasing. Riders all tried to get to the front before they reached dangerous points of the course after being informed about them by “the guys calling the shots on the radios”.
This resulted in more urgency and speed as hazards on the course approached, with Froome saying conditions used to be more relaxed and therefore less dangerous.
“Our directeurs, they’ve got stuff like VeloViewer, apps
like VeloViewer, where basically in real time it will tell them back in the car
what corners are coming, how wide the road is at certain points; they can
actually just click on the map and see what the road looks like,” he said.
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"We’ve just got this abundance of data coming through to us about conditions on the road, what’s coming up. So everyone knows what to expect, so it’s this huge fight for position.
"It’s mental because it’s the only sport in the
world where someone says to you ‘right guys, you’re going through a really
narrow, dangerous little village coming up, the road’s really tiny and there’s
a small bridge with a corner straight afterwards…’. It’s the only sport where
we’ll go faster when they’ve told us there’s danger coming up ahead.
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“You want to be the ones to get there first because you
know if you’re at the back, you’re going to be stuck in this backlog of people
trying to get through this narrow point, this pinch point, in the race. The
race just lifts 5 kilometre per hour as everyone fights to get there first.”
Froome believed “as a result of” very detailed information about courses being passed to the riders in real time via the race radios “racing has become more dangerous… through having more data it’s made the race more dangerous”.
“Previously we wouldn’t have known each pinch point is
there and there would’ve have been this massive scurry for position and trying
to get to the front first. We would have got there and just all been more
relaxed and got through it with no issues. But now, that’s changed quite a bit.”
He also believed advances in technology, specifically power meters, had pushed up the standard of pro cycling. He believed while power meters had been available and used in cycling for many years, it was only more recently that the data from the meters was properly understood and used in training.
“Now we've just got so much data, from the guys who are winning the biggest races in the world. And that data basically helps form the basis of training programmes and all preparation that lead to racing.
"Across the board we’ve seen a huge raise of the bar in terms of the general level of performance in professional cycling," he added, saying the data enabled very “guided” interval training, thus pushing up the standard across the sport.
