Team Sky popularised the idea of sleep as the greatest recovery tool a rider possesses. A week in July wouldn’t pass without tales of a van pulling up outside a French Ibis and some poor driver offloading a team’s worth of bespoke mattresses and toppers so that Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome could have the same sleep setup as they had at home, which would hopefully result in a rapid ride the next day. Fast-forward to 2023 and the whole peloton is at it.
Mattress company Dorelan supports – literally – Mads Pedersen and the crew at Lidl-Trek; Latexco sponsors Soudal-QuickStep, while Jumbo-Visma aim even higher thanks to Australian company Box Altitude’s rarefied-air sleep systems. With a sprinkling of irony, Team Sky (now Ineos Grenadiers) awoke the competition to the benefits of greater shut-eye, and in the process inspired sports scientist Dr Sarah Gilchrist to dig deeper into the recuperative powers of sleep.
‘You mention Team Sky,’ she says when speaking to Cyclist. ‘My doctorate specialised in sleep and athletic performance so I was interested in what they were doing, but they really focused on the practical side of sleeping. There was no data I could find on “athletic sleep”. I was working with British Rowing in the lead-up to the 2012 London Olympics and we were worried about recovery with the expected increase in media requests. We’d seen an increase in media demand in 2011 and we realised we didn’t have objective data on sleep.’
The gold standard
Dr Gilchrist has spent over 20 years working in the high-performance sport industry, latterly as technical lead for the English
