Steve Cummings, the former Sky Pro Cycling rider now working for Ineos Grenadiers, says he suspected he was being used as a “guinea pig” by the team for some of its ideas. He believes, for example, that an extreme diet aimed at bringing a rider’s weight right down was trialled on him first to test its impact before the team would try it with team leader Bradley Wiggins.
“To give one example, which I suspect was to act as a test run for Wiggins before they tried it on him, I trialled a super-restricted diet of 1000 calories a day,” he writes in his new autobiography “The Break, Life as a Cycling Maverick”.
“It was centred on what they called ‘fruit days’: in other words, two pieces of fruit five times a day and half a pint of skimmed milk for your protein, and that’d be it. Our nutritionist would measure your body fat levels and say, ‘OK, you’re 10 per cent, pop in a couple of fruit days and that’ll bring you back down.’
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“These were combined with a catabolic diet of no breakfast, ride your bike for up to five hours, then have 200–300 grams of meat or fish and salad for lunch and dinner. Five days on like that, then five days off.”
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Cummings said in 2010, the year Sky started, he tried that routine for three months for fortnightly intervals. His weight went down to a new low of 69.9kg. That was just over 5kgs lower than in 2015 and 2016 when he was at his most successful.
Cummings said he was very pleased with the results initially, and he was very strong on short steep climbs. However, he said like all crash diets, his body then reacted poorly to it and he became “bloated”.
He also says that in the first two years of the team – after which he moved on – he found Sky’s racing strategy far too “rigid”. Everything was geared around helping the team leader in stage races even when it became clear their GC challenge was over and so the other riders were not allowed to go up the road in breakaways.
Occasionally the team would then switch tack and try and go for stage wins but, he says, they usually left that too late, by which time the best chances to take a stage win were over.
He moved on after two years and said while he has now gone back to work for the team, he has done so because the team has changed and the environment suits him much more now as a management figure than it did when he was a rider.
