Foix – Tadej Pogacar said that you just have to “eat food like a robot and go with the flow” when explaining his Tour de France preparation and strategy.

Preparation for the Tour has changed immeasurably over recent years, with fuelling one of the major areas of development.

Another is a rider’s physical form at the start of the race.

Around 10 years ago, when Briton Chris Froome was in his pomp, he used to arrive at a Grand Tour slightly ‘under-cooked’ and would aim to ride himself into peak form by the third week.

“I had always planned to build into the race and finishing stronger than I started,” Froome said in 2018, after he won the Giro d’Italia.

He had arrived at the race slightly overweight and short of form, and started the final week almost five minutes behind race leader Simon Yates.

But while his compatriot Yates cracked on the penultimate mountain stage, Froome came on stronger and stronger to take the victory.

But such a tactic of riding into form has long been abandoned.

“This was in the past, like 20 years ago, when they were aiming that the shape will grow to the last week,” Pogacar said after his victory on Stage 3 from Granollers in Spain to Les Angles on July 6.

“These days you need to come (with) the best shape possible in the start of the Tour and you go with it.

“You try to recover every day as much as possible, eat food like a robot and just go with the flow.”

Gorging on food is another major change in Tour preparation.

In Froome’s day, riders would deprive their bodies of sugars during training to try to lose weight and encourage the body to use fat for energy.

“Two eggs for breakfast and we were off for five-six hours of training, with wa...