These days, one staff may use 100 per day, in line with Paul Navin, who does therapeutic massage remedy and different important duties as a soigneur for Howes’s staff. At the Tour de France this summer season, that might be 100 bidons instances 23 groups, then instances the 21 days of racing. It provides as much as 48,300 bidons alongside a course of two,000-plus miles.
Those bidons now must be disposed of in particular methods, which embrace giving them to a staff soigneur or throwing them into any staff’s automotive. Navin defined that he now waited together with the highway with a rubbish bag so his staff — and every other staff — may throw away its bidons. He spends additional time looking the realm for errant ones, nervous that he shall be fined for leaving trash behind.
Howes’s job simply obtained more durable, too. As a domestique, which is a staff’s employee bee, he had the job final week of choosing up crammed water bottles from the staff automotive and distributing them amongst his teammates. He then needed to acquire the used bottles and discover the place to dump them — with out breaking the principles. On one event, he took a 30-minute detour to drop bidons into a race decide’s automotive.
“Meanwhile, there’s a thousand people on the side of the road, yelling, ‘Bidon! Bidon!’ And I can’t even give them a small piece of the race that would make them so happy,” he stated. “It’s beyond frustrating.”
The introduction of the brand new guidelines has hardly been easy, Howes stated.
Throwing bidons to a soigneur on the roadside has been a problem for the cyclists, he stated, as a result of typically there are as many as 50 of them nearly concurrently making an attempt to take action whereas dashing by. Throwing accuracy is just not a prized talent amongst riders.
“None of us played ball sports, so you have a bunch of skinny cyclists trying to wing a half-full bottle over a bunch of riders, and it could be pretty dangerous,” Howes stated.
When bottles find yourself outdoors the designated location, he stated, it’s unclear how the authorities will decide precisely who was accountable: “Is C.S.I. going to be tracking down the fingerprints on the bottle to figure out which teams should be penalized?”
