Why Tour de France Riders Climb So Fast — What Most Cyclists Get Wrong

[00:00:00]The fastest climbers in the world are not riding faster bikes than you. In fact, on the steepest mountains of the Tour to France, the bike is almost irrelevant. That sounds wrong. It goes against everything the cycling industry has told you for 30 years. But the numbers do not lie. And once you understand what actually makes a tour rider fly up a mountain, you will never look at climbing or your own bike the same way again. If you enjoy honest, deeply researched cycling stories like this one, subscribe to All About Bikes because this rabbit hole goes further than you think. Let us start with the assumption almost every cyclist carries around. You watch Today Pagotcha and dance up the cold galabier and somewhere in the back of your mind, a quiet voice says the same thing it always says.

[00:00:41]Lighter bike, better wheels, stiffer frame. If I had that equipment, I would climb like that, too. Maybe not exactly like that, but closer. The industry loves this voice. It has built entire product categories around it. Climbing bikes, climbing wheels, weight weeny components measured in grams and priced in thousands. And to be fair, the logic feels sound. Climbing is a fight against gravity. Gravity acts on mass. Less mass means less fight. Simple physics except the physics when you actually run the numbers tells a very different story about where the speed really comes from.

[00:01:14]To understand why, we need to go back about 30 years to a period the sport would rather forget. In the 1990s, climbing speeds in the tour to France exploded. Riders were ascending ald due faster than anyone in history on bikes that were heavier, less aerodynamic, and less stiff than anything sold today.

[00:01:31][music] Steel and early aluminum frames, box section wheels, down tube shifters on some bikes. The equipment was primitive by modern standards. And yet, the times from that era stood untouched for decades. The reason, of course, was blood doping. EPO transformed the sport by transforming the riders, not the bikes. And while that chapter is a dark one, it accidentally proved something important. It isolated the variable.

[00:01:53]When you change the engine and leave the machine alone, climbing speed changes dramatically. When you change the machine and leave the engine alone, almost nothing happens. The '90s were an uncontrolled, unethical, but brutally clear experiment in what actually matters on a mountain. Here's the core of it. Climbing performance comes down to one number, and it is not the weight of your bike. It is watts per kg. The power a rider can sustain divided by the combined weight of rider and machine. A to France contender on a long alpine climb holds somewhere between 6 and 7 watts per kilogram for 30 or 40 minutes.

[00:02:25]A strong amateur racer might hold 4 1/2.

[00:02:28]A fit recreational rider maybe 3 1/2.

[00:02:31]Now watch what happens when we do the math the industry never puts in its marketing. Take a 70 kg rider on an 8 kg bike. Total system weight 78 kg. Spend $5,000 to shave a full kilogram off the bike, which is genuinely hard to do, and you have reduced the total by about 1.3%. On a 40-minute climb, that saves you roughly 30 seconds, meaningful in a race decided by seconds, almost invisible on your Sunday ride.

[00:02:56]Meanwhile, the difference between that amateur at 4 1/2 watts per kg and the professional at 6 1/2 is not 1%, [music] it is more than 40%. That is the gap, not the frame, not the wheels, the engine. A tour rider on a rusty hybrid from a garage sale would still drop nearly every amateur on a carbon superbike and it would not even be close. But this is where things get more interesting because the modern era added a layer that even most dedicated cyclists have not fully absorbed.

[00:03:22]Climbing times in the tour today are faster than the EPO era. Riders are now beating records set by chemically enhanced athletes and they're doing it in the most tested sport on Earth. So what changed? This is the part nobody talks about enough. And if you are finding this valuable, this is a good moment to subscribe because the answer reshaped professional cycling in less than a decade. The first change happened in the kitchen, not the workshop. For most of cycling history, riders believed the human gut could absorb about 60 g of carbohydrate per hour. Eat more and you would end up sick by the roadside. Then sports scientists discovered that by mixing glucose and fructose in specific ratios, the body could use separate absorption pathways in the intestine.

[00:04:01]Suddenly, riders were training their guts like a muscle, pushing intake to 120 gram per hour, sometimes more. The practical effect is enormous. A rider who arrives at the final climb with full glycogen stores as a different athlete from one running on fumes. Much of what looks like superhuman climbing in the third week of a grand tour is really superhuman fueling. There is also altitude. Modern teams spend weeks at a time living at 2,000 meters or higher in places like Tenneref and Sierra Nevada, forcing the body to produce more red blood cells naturally. It is, in a strange twist of history, a legal way to chase some of the same physiology the '90s chased with a syringe. The riders who dominate the mountains today often spend more nights per year at altitude than at home. That commitment is invisible on race day, but it is baked into every pedal stroke on every climb.

[00:04:47]The next change [music] was pacing.

[00:04:49]Power meters turned climbing from an art into a controlled burn. In the old days, riders attacked on feel, blew up on feel, and lost minutes on feel. [music] Today, a team car knows exactly what its leader can sustain, and the rider executes the climb like a metered engineering problem. Steady output, no surges wasted. Everything measured, it looks less dramatic on television.

[00:05:09][music] It is devastatingly faster. The third change is the one that quietly embarrasses the lightweight obsession.

[00:05:14]Aerodynamics matter on climbs. Not on the brutal 15% walls, but on the long alpine grades of 6 or 7%, professionals are climbing at 20 to 25 km per hour. At those speeds, air resistance is still eating a meaningful share of their power. This is why modern climbers wear skin suits in the mountains, why they ride a frames even on summit finish days, and why teams stopped chasing the absolute minimum weight years ago. The UCI limit of 6.8 kg made the weight were pointless. Anyway, every serious bike hits the limit. The battle moved to the air flow, the fueling, and the physiology while the marketing aimed at consumers kept talking about GS. And that brings us to the trade-off because there is one, and it is worth being honest about. Modern professional climbing is faster, but the sources of that speed do not transfer cleanly to normal riders. You cannot buy watts per kilogram. You can buy the Aerof frame, but at 12 km/h up your local hill, the arrow gain is a rounding >> [music] >> error. You can copy the fueling strategy, but 120 g of carbs an hour on a 90-minute ride mostly just adds calories you did not need. The tools that make Pagotch fast were designed for a physiological context that almost none of us occupy. That is not a criticism of the technology. It is a criticism of how it gets sold because here is the industry angle and it is a subtle one.

[00:06:28]The bike industry does not exactly lie to you. Everything in the catalog is technically true. This wheel set does save 40 g. This frame does save 8 watts at 45 km/h. What the industry does instead is let you borrow the context of professional racing and apply it to your own riding without ever correcting the error. The unspoken message of every climbing bike advertisement is that the limiting factor is your equipment. The uncomfortable truth is that for 99% of riders, the limiting factor is training time, body weight, and fitness. Three things no company can sell you in a box.

[00:07:01]There is a psychological layer here, too. Buying speed feels good. Earning speed is slow, unglamorous, and occasionally miserable. A new bike arrives in a week. A meaningful bump in threshold power takes a winter of structured intervals. The industry did not create that preference. It simply built a very profitable business on top of it. And in fairness, riders are willing participants. Nobody is forced to believe that a lighter derure will change their life on a climb. We choose to believe it because the alternative is admitting the engine is the problem and the engine is us. So what is the honest verdict? It is not that equipment is worthless. At the professional level, where every rider has a nearly identical engine, the marginal gains are the race.

[00:07:40]30 seconds from a kilogram of weight, 10 watts from aerodynamics, a 5% edge from better fueling. Stack those and you win the tour to France. The margins are real. They are just margins on top of a foundation. And the foundation is a cardiovascular system built over 10,000 hours of training, a power to weight ratio at the edge of human capability, and a level of professional support most of us cannot imagine. For the rest of us, the lesson cuts the other way. If you want to climb faster, and most cyclists secretly do, the order of operations is almost the reverse of what the catalog suggest. Ride more. Lose the easy kg from the body before chasing the expensive grams on the bike. Learn to pace a climb evenly instead of attacking the bottom and dying at the top. Eat properly on long rides. Do those four things for a year and you will gain more time on your local mountain than any upgrade the industry has ever [music] produced. Then if you still want the beautiful lightweight bike, buy it. Buy it because it brings you joy. Because it is a genuinely wonderful machine and because cycling is allowed to be about more than seconds. Just do not buy it believing it is the reason the professionals are fast. It never was.

[00:08:44]Tour to France riders climb the way they do because they are extraordinary engines, meticulously fueled, precisely paced, and supported by science that [music] took a century to mature. The bikes are the smallest part of the story, and the industry has every incentive to make them look like the biggest. Somewhere between those two truths is where thoughtful cyclists should live. The equipment is real. The marketing is real, too. Knowing the difference is what separates a rider who understands the sport from one who just consumes it. Sometimes the fastest upgrade is the one nobody can sell you.

[00:09:15]If this changed how you think about climbing, consider subscribing to All About Bikes because the next story questions something even bigger. The mountains are not going anywhere. The question is what you bring to them.