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."
Cycling has come a long way since then, and not just in the area of sleep. Sports are in a golden age of performance science. This is interesting on its own, but also for the idiosyncratic ways regular people do and don't benefit from all these breakthroughs. The hardcore sports science stuff is on a spectrum with general health and wellness, and I find the consumer trends, the process of filtration between the highest levels and the layperson, and the culture responsible for that process to be fascinating. Everyone wants to be healthy, which is in harmony with every athlete's desire to perform.
This desire to be well and to push the natural limits of the human body is feverish in our modern, panoptic context. People want a magic combination of simple behaviors and substances that will unlock immortality, beauty, and health, especially as the world becomes a more hostile place to live in and an increasingly difficult matter to make sense of. The irony is that there really isn't any big mystery. Most of the stuff that works—get good sleep, eat right, take care of your brain—is unsexy, and takes a lot of work, less a prescription and more like a practice. Most of the bleeding-edge stuff is either inaccessible to the layperson or bullshit. Bryan Johnson is trying to outlast death by optimizing all of his bodily functions. Thielian San Franciscans can't stop posting about having peptide injection parties. A recently deceased looksmaxxer's friend said they were injecting liquid gold.
This is why I find sleep fascinating. When we sleep, we experience one of the most miraculous properties of the human body: regeneration. Sleeping is like microdosing immortality, the real version of what the alchemical seekers are stumbling toward. It's universal, absolutely necessary, and seemingly simple, yet it's also dependent on all manner of other processes. Nothing else in sports science or wellness is as tied into holistic human performance as sleep is. No other sport's athletes need sleep to the same degree as cyclists. So how do the best cyclists in the world sleep, and what does that say about the importance of sleep?
"Everything is controlled," Greenwell said, "and recovery is the most controlled thing we do now." Cyclists at the Tour de France are some of the most monitored people on the planet. Being a professional cyclist requires you to surrender your body to science. During competition, their physical condition is tracked to a harrowing degree. At night, most riders wear sleep tracking bands. "We can track their hours of sleep, their quality of sleep, but also we can track their recovery in the morning as well," Greenwell said. "And so that's one of the things we'll look at when they wake up every morning, then we try and work back from there."
Riders' sleep is tracked even when they're training. "Literally one glass of wine [Ed. note: in the offseason; riders don't drink during the Tour anymore] can be enough to knock off their recovery scores because although it lets you get into a light sleep quicker, it doesn't let you go into the same deep sleep," he said.
The race to get to sleep starts as soon as the day's racing ends. Riders will cross the line and be met with various measures to cool them down, then they'll be fed two meals, the latter of which Greenwell would like to happen as early as possible so nobody is digesting too close to bedtime. The riders drink cherry juice after the race and take magnesium before bed, but Greenwell abhors sleeping pills because they prevent you from accessing REM sleep. "We try and do everything else around the sleep environment rather than just chucking the sleeping tablets at them," he said. Each rider has a custom pillow, made for their preferred sleeping position and physiology. One quirk of working with cyclists is that they have particularly sensitive necks that need to be kept limber.
At the Tour de France, teams are assigned hotels by the Amaury Sport Organization (ASO), which organizes the race. They usually get the nicest places in whatever town the race is in—EF's hotel in Aurillac was great—though the process is still somewhat of a crapshoot. The very same rest day I reported this story, Uno-X riders posted a video of their arachnid roommates that forced them outside, and UAE's hotel's air conditioning and maybe also power crapped out. "If we could choose anything, then we'd have like our own RV, and the riders would always sleep in the RV," Greenwell said. "But you're not allowed to do that. Otherwise it just becomes an arms race."
While the teams are probably frustrated with this limitation, I find it a charming quirk. To win the Tour de France, you still have to be, meaningfully, in France. The way teams manage this is through the innovation I teased at the top of this story. EF uses smart mattress toppers that allow precise customization of pressure and temperature. Keeping riders cool is essential: Greenwell says they don't use hotel air conditioning, because it's noisy and it dries you out, thus making you more susceptible to infection.
EF assistant Walid Karim's job is to pack up riders' rooms as soon as they leave to prepare for the race, drive to the finish, and assemble the mattress toppers. "There are three of us, and it takes us an hour to an hour and a half to disassemble everything," he said, "then about the same amount of time to get everything ready." They try to get to the hotels as fast as possible, because there's fierce competition for limited parking at some hotels. Which teams are on it? "Lotto is good," Karim said. "But if you ask me, we're the best."
EF let me see one of the mattress toppers. A pair of thick, insulated hoses connect the three-inch-thick pad to a cooling unit the size of two shoeboxes. The machine emits no noise. Each rider has theirs tuned to their particular specifications. The mattresses are connected to an app that allows a fine level of tuning and provides reams of data. Other than the hoses, the beds look totally normal. It's the ideal environment in which to sleep.
EF's sleeping topper sponsor is only currently offering their product to the public via a waitlist, though competitors retail for $6,000. But all the bed technology in the world can't solve an insomniac's problems. I asked Greenwell if the team could make poor sleepers into good ones. He stressed what LeBron James and Victor Wembanyama have also emphasized: Good sleep is downstream of taking care of your brain.
Some of that is keeping the riders away from the blue light of their smartphones, and some is meditation. "If they're like anxious or worried, then we'll do breathing pattern work to try and change the parasympathetic-sympathetic drive," he said. "And that can definitely improve their sleep patterning. Often, some of them will just like lie in bed and do 15 minutes of meditation or deep breathing exercises, and that makes a difference."
This gets to the core of what I find so fascinating about sleep. It is at the border of the inaccessible and the accessible. Few people can afford to spend thousands of dollars on a smart mattress topper, but anyone can do some breathwork. And everyone needs good sleep, whether you're a professional cyclist producing steam-engine-type watts or a sweaty journalist tasked with covering those very same riders. Cycling's other performance advancements have been dramatic, though not always as simple. An EF mechanic told me his job has changed dramatically in the past few years and compared the sport's engineering and optimization levels to Formula 1. The amount riders eat (a ton), the intervals at which they eat (constantly), and the composition of what they eat (carbs, so many carbs) have all been-fine tuned.
That stuff all matters, but none of it matters without sleep. I find this somewhat comforting. Though EF intensely monitors its riders' sleep and optimizes so much of their day around making sure they get good sleep, the team is essentially applying commonly held beliefs about sleep to a maximalist degree. The common man's Don't get too hot is EF's finely tuned, better-than-AC cooling apparatuses. The layperson's Don't watch viral vertical videos in bed until 2:17 a.m. is EF's bedtime clock that begins as the race ends. There are innovations happening in the realm of sleep, but ultimately, it's a simple process.
This says a lot about the limits of the real hardcore biohacking stuff. There's a challenge in a simple answer. It would be so easy if health were a matter of getting one simple peptide injection, avoiding one single food, or putting oneself into a trance by watching the right YouTube video or whatever. That's the desire latter-day snake oil salesmen prey on. But if so much of health is downstream of something as basic as getting good sleep, it requires you to adopt the behaviors that get you there, like eating well and taking care of your mental health, which aren't simple. You can't cheat sleep.
The main thing that distinguishes professional cycling teams like EF in the realm of sleep is that they take it seriously. The stuff they're doing is beyond what any of us can do, but they're just trying to get to the same place everyone is: in bed and asleep.
