Built, Not Born: The Making of a Tour Rider

Graham O’ Brien
Jul 24
6 min read

What It Really Takes to Make the Tour de France

With a lot more people in Ireland now tuned in to the Tour this year due to the success of Ben Healy and some very strong performances from Eddie Dunbar in the early stages. I thought I would share some of the sacrifices these riders have had to make to just reach this level, let alone be competitive.

Naturally as the sport is not one of the top 3 sports in Ireland, many people don't understand that these riders are professionals who have sacrificed their lives over the past 10/15 years to be in this position. If you've raced on the bike, you've probably been asked "Are you going to do the Tour de France?"

For example, you wouldn't ask someone if they're going to play in the premier league this coming August or if they're going to play in the World Cup next year. Well, the Tour de France is on the same scale. What these riders have done to reach this level is quite hard to put in to words to be honest. So I'll try and give an example in figures of both their training and racing miles done to even be selected by their team to race the Tour de France. I also have a story from a previous mentor who raced the Tour de France 5 times.

Talking numbers

On average, most pro riders race around 60 to 80 days a year. If they’ve been in the sport since they were juniors, they could have 10 to 12 years of racing behind them before they ever get selected for a Grand Tour. That’s 350 to 500 race days and add in training days, and they’re spending around 1,000 hours on the bike every single year. Averaging around 700 kilometers of training per week and even more if doing a multi-stage event.

In terms of distance or volume per year, most pros are riding 25,000 to 35,000 kilometers annually. Multiply that by 8 to 10 years of professional training and you’re looking at over 200,000 kilometers. Do you even have 200k on your car!? That’s the kind of load it takes to develop the engine to handle three weeks of flat-out racing at the highest level.

The sacrifices behind the numbers: My time learning from a five time Tour de France rider & Giro stage winner.

This journey to become a professional rider starts early for most and many of these riders began racing seriously at 14 or 15, working their way through junior races, development teams, and the tough under-23 scene. For every name you recognise on the Tour start list, there are hundreds who gave everything from a young age and didn’t make it.

The social sacrifices are massive, holidays, birthdays and even college in most cases gets skipped. Nutrition is dialled in year-round and every gram on the bike matters. Everything in life gets built around the bike and I've a story to tell on the sacrifices you need to make to reach the Tour de France put bluntly by an old french man who rode the Tour de France from 1979 to 1984 and also won a stage of the Giro d'Italia.

When I was racing in France I was living in Montpellier for one of those years. I cracked my frame in a crash and had to get a new frame delivered from Ireland as I had a one day race in Narbonne coming up that weekend, and needed to get the components on my cracked frame onto the new frame. Anyway, I had to visit the local bike shop and it was the aforementioned older frenchman who owned this shop, which was probably the size of a small Irish post office wedged in between a patisserie and a pharmacy in Saint-Clément-de-Rivière, just outside Montpellier. His name was Patrick Bonnet.

I remember we pulled up outside this small bike shop and my team manager at the time saying that Patrick had ridden the Tour de France five times and won a stage of the Giro in 1982. That he was also Bernard Hinault and Laurent Fignons teammate on Renault for 2 years, of which one of those years Bernard Hinault won the tour, in 1982. I thought "yeah right".

I didn't believe it until I started talking to Patrick, who had broken english but just enough to be able to understand him. Patrick took the bike off me and left it in his tiny workshop area and started talking to my team manager, who told him I was over from Ireland racing full-time with the team, Patrick dropped everything and left the bike in his workshop area and came back to me and I'll never forget the next couple of sentences he spoke. He asked in broken english "How is your training life" as in what's your daily lifestyle like at the minute.

It was my second year in France and being 18 and living alone in an apartment in the middle of the countryside, I wasn't too keen on staying at home all the time so I'd go out and meet my teammates or get the bus into the city of Montpellier after training. I was only in my third month with that team and it was tough adapting to the level of racing but I was getting by in each race. Until we went to any elite national race where there was U23 feeder teams from the professional teams showing up and splitting the races early on every time, their level was higher and I'd really suffer early on and end up in the grupetto for the day or DNF.

Patrick said, if you want to be successful here then "Pas de Femmes" (no women), "no walking" before or after training, "no city" and "pasta, pasta". He pointed to his sandals he was wearing and at this moment I had no idea what he was going to say but he said, "Monk" in french ("moine") and my team manager turned to me and said he's saying you have to "live like a monk, that's the only way". True old school talk, but it was true. With the level of the competition, what other choice do you have only to go all in. That's the sacrifice all the other french riders winning these elite nationals were making, except for years.

Patrick also got a bit pissed off trying to talk in english and talked more to my team manager who could translate the rest. On the journey home in the car I heard the rest of the advice and it was along the lines of. You have to live like nothing else matters and focus only on training, nothing else apart from the bike, food and sleep. I was already very committed to training and recovery but Patrick said it as if I could be doing so much more. He hit the nail.

I took his advice literally for the rest of my time there, pretty miserable but it taught me some great lessons about how dedicated you have to be to something and I returned a good few times to his shop during my time there to get some words of wisdom off Patrick. A true old school french racer who epitomised what it took to get to the Tour de France and some of it rings through until this day. Although....Patrick was a very old school professional cyclist so it's not exactly as miserable as this today. He didn't use a phone at the time but if he did I'd be ringing him for advice today.....although maybe not the monk part!

Here's a picture with Patrick from the first time I met him, the day he fixed my bike in his shop in Saint Clement de Riviere, Montpellier. A proper old school bike shop with photos of his teams from grand tours and random race wins. Look up his Pro Cycling Stats page if you're interested, he has some top results. I'm also happy to say I just google searched his bike shop which is also still open 10 years later. If anyone understands french, I found an interview he did on youtube where it shows his famous bike shop and he goes through his career and explains what it took to make it as a professional cyclist to ride the Tour de France, here's the link with subtitles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BNxOcGDZEM.

10 years later now and some element of nostalgia looking back!