This year’s Tour de France threw an added stage into the opening portion of the race. Normally the first rest day falls on the second Monday of the race, but this year pushed that back. The reason? The second Monday this year fell on Bastille Day, a national holiday in France, and a day the nation could watch or visit the race.
After 10 chaotic stages, the peloton will be sure to enjoy a day off, with the proper mountain tests looming large on the horizon. However, even though these days are called rest days, they are anything but time to kick back and take a day to do some sightseeing. Instead, rest days are all about preparing for what is to come in the following days.
To find out more about rest days and what they actually mean for riders, I spoke with Jacob Tipper, coach to current maillot jaune Ben Healy of EF Education-EasyPost, to find out what is done and why. As it turns out, even though rest days are vitally important, they're one of the last places in the sport that have resisted scientific optimisation.
There is no science to back it up, but (almost) everyone rides
When asked if riders should spend some time on their bikes during a rest day Tipper opened by saying, “You should ride. There's no science [behind it], but it's 100% unequivocally important.”
The tricky thing with rest days in Grand Tours is that it is very hard to simulate the load riders are put under in the 9-10 stages prior and the 5-6 stages that follow. [Typically, a Grand Tour has nine stages followed by a rest day on a Monday; this year's Tour opted for a Tuesday rest day because Bastille Day fell on a Monday. - Ed.] The only time that there is a sample large enough to study the impact of different rest day protocols to draw any meaningful conclusions is during a Grand Tour itself.
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