How Cycling Solved Sleep

AURILLAC, France — Is the Tour de France is the most competitive sleep environment in sports? “Probably, yeah,” answered Dr. Jon Greenwell, EF-Education EasyPost’s Head Doctor when I asked him. Every athlete needs to recover, though the demands on professional cyclists at the biggest race in the sport are unique. Riders have to be fresh every day for nearly a month, and they spend almost every night at a different hotel. There are only two days off, so they must recover from one day’s effort before the next day’s racing starts the next morning. If you don’t sleep, you can’t race.

One of Greenwell’s primary responsibilities at the Tour is making sure the riders are getting enough high-quality sleep every night. On the first rest day of the Tour de France, I caught up with him and Walid Karim, an EF staffer responsible for assembling the team’s sleep apparatuses, because I wanted to know how they managed it. Sleep is a whole-day effort, and EF uses some bed technology I’d never heard of before that seems extremely effective. Last year, a staffer told me they averaged over eight hours and 15 minutes of sleep, per rider, per night.

The attention given to somnial matters has increased drastically in the recent past. Greenwell joined the team 10 years ago, after stints with Great Britain’s Olympic swimming and triathlon programs, and his time in the sport is contemporary with the sleep revolution. “Basically, you just had what you were given,” he says of the way things were done when he joined, describing “typical French hotels with these long bolster pillows, that are just so uncomfortable.”