What do Tour de France riders eat?

As more money has come into cycling and nutritional know-how has become ingrained within teams, riders have been treated to a better standard of food at the Tour de France.

Nutritionists such as Will Girling and top chefs such as Hannah Grant have become full-time employees – Girling worked 100 days on the road with his old team EF Education in 2024, while Grant has worked at the Tour with Team Saxo-Tinkoff and Team Jumbo-Visma.

This means the days of white pasta and boiled chicken are over, with high-quality meals cooked every night by chefs who take over a hotel kitchen and serve the riders nutritious, bespoke food, rather than whatever the hotel throws up.

Recipes such as Grant's quinoa bowls, with beetroot, sweet potato and cottage cheese (included in her most recent book, The New Grand Tour Cookbook), are both light and tasty – important for riders who are fed up of eating at the end of a long day.

“Even when hungry, Tour riders can suffer from food fatigue after a hard stage, and they struggle to eat. But [quinoa bowls] adds sweetness and saltiness and flavour, so you get the palatability of that sweet and salty pop.”

Some of the less healthy stuff – such as pizzas and burgers – is still on the menu, albeit with a healthy spin. “We’d do pizzas, less loaded with cheese, and burgers with lean mince,” says Girling.

“For the day, there’d be blondies made with sweet potato. The riders aren’t denied anything.”

Sweet taste of success

Sweet potato is a favoured ingredient of Grant's; its sweetness, texture and high nutritional value make it a brilliant substitute as a cake base for refined ingredients such as sugar and flour.

Dates, in place of sugar, and carrots, celeriac and beetroot – which provide slow-release energy on the bike – are other ingredients that she incorporated into her book The Cake Cook Book in 2023 and are widely used by the pro cyclists she knows.

“I wanted to get across that this is cake that you can train and race on, but when your mother-in-law comes round, you can serve it with coffee and give it to your kids without pumping them full of refined sugar.”

It was when spending time in Japan prior to the pandemic that the seed for sweet potato as a base ingredient took root.

“On the streets there, instead of an ice cream, you can get a baked sweet potato in tin foil. It has a natural sweetness when baked, which means you can lower the added sugar content. It’s an ingredient that works in both the savoury and sweet kitchen,” says Grant.

She also liked the idea of taking unloved, discarded fruit and veg, from the bottom of the fridge or leftover from a bike ride, to good use.

“All the root veg that are sad down there, the little bendy carrot that you’ve left forever. They turn into cake!”

Uneaten bananas were a particular bugbear of Grant's when she worked on Saxo Bank, and she’s found use for them in several recipes in the new book.

“Pro riders love a banana… as long as it’s yellow. Once it’s brown, they won’t touch it. They’re disgusted by it.

“Soigneurs [team staff] would come to me at the end of every day with boxes of brown bananas. I would peel them, freeze them, then blitz them in the food processor, add choc chips and yoghurt and have a base for ice cream. They’d eat that!”