How do pro cyclists pee during a stage of the Tour de France?

Like a stage of the Tour de France, tennis is an endurance sport where play can run for more than five hours. Given such lengths of time, answering a call of nature becomes essential for most players. Too much fluid is going in for it not to.

In a tennis match, the procedure is civilised. A player will depart the court, escorted by an official, and scamper off to the privacy of a changing room toilet.

Not so in the free-for-all world of road cycling, where the race never truly stops until the riders cross the finish line, and the bladders and bowels of 183 others need to be accounted for. So, how do they do it?

The ways and means are numerous and depend on what’s happening with the race at any moment, according to Will Girling, a nutritionist who’s worked at the Tour with the EF Education team.

“They do a ‘pro piss’. They’ll drift to the back of the peloton and pee out of the side of their shorts while riding. Sometimes, the peloton will agree to stop together. It depends on the state of the race.

“[During] any kind of natural break – waiting at a level crossing, or when the stage’s breakaway has gone up the road and it calms down – they’ll take the opportunity.”

One rider who needn’t fear stopping is the yellow jersey wearer. Among its many superpowers is the ability to hold up the race while a rider takes a pee.

The start of a stage is when a rider is most susceptible to needing a pee. On steaming hot days at the Tour, with stages beginning in late morning, riders take on plenty of fluid in order to start the race fully hydrated.

That can fill a bladder, but with lengthy neutralised zones before ‘kilometre zero’ (the official start of the race), that can create time for them to go together. That’s providing there’s an appropriate place to do so: around fans or into any kind of body of water can see you rack up a fine for your team.

At the start of a long day, with riders in their freshly laundered Lycra, is the time to stop and take a pee in as civilised a way as possible.

That’s not the case later in a stage, when riders are sweaty and dirty and not feeling their best. At this point, anything goes. Mark Cavendish told GQ in 2014 that on cold, wet days, he’d take a pee on the bike, through his shorts, just to feel some warmth. Nobody said this was a glamorous sport.

It gets worse…

The glamour erodes even further when it comes to needing a sit-down job. In the best-case scenario, a rider will have enough warning to make a plan. “They’ll whip down the shorts and do it by a tree,” says Girling.

Sometimes, they might not be able to wait, with their surroundings leaving them more exposed.

During his 2023 World Championship victory in Glasgow, Mathieu van der Poel had to dash into someone’s house to use their bathroom – a gesture he credited with helping him win the race.

At the 1986 Tour de France, some prior Mexican food put Greg LeMond in a spot of bother with stomach trouble mid-stage – a plight that got so desperate he defecated into a teammate's cap.