At the Tour de France, strategy is built long before the riders reach the start line. Every stage presents a different opportunity, and every rider brings a different strength. Success comes from understanding where those strengths match the demands of the race, then turning preparation into smart decisions on the road.
For Team Jayco AlUla, TrainingPeaks helps connect course demands, rider profiles, and daily performance data into one shared preparation process. From tracking weekly climbing meters, training load progression, and kilojoule expenditure to comparing planned versus actual workload, monitoring rider feedback, and refining nutrition and recovery strategies, the platform helps the team prepare for the specific demands of each stage.
That’s why over 80% of the WorldTour teams on the start line in Barcelona trust TrainingPeaks to build, manage, and optimize their training data.
With We Speak Peak, TrainingPeaks is shifting the Tour de France conversation beyond race results to spotlight the coaches and performance teams behind cycling’s biggest stage. In this Q&A, Jayco AlUla Sport Engineering Director Marco Pinotti explains how Team Jayco AlUla, the Strategists, uses TrainingPeaks to identify opportunities, translate data into race-day decisions, and turn individual rider strengths into collective performance.
Meet Team Jayco AlUla, the Strategists
While we don’t focus on a GC goal, we aim to be competitive in multiple stages: we have
different riders with different skills and the goal is to identify opportunities in selected stages
where we will be able to capitalize on the versatilty of the our group
Q: How does your team specifically utilize TrainingPeaks to prepare for the
unique demands of the Tour de France?
A: TrainingPeaks is the central platform connecting not only coaches and riders but other
performance staff throughout preparation process.
In the months leading into the race, Tour de Franch course demands are our benchmark and starting
backward, we track weekly climbing meters, training load progression, energy expenditure and
specific workload targets that replicate the physiological demands expected during the three
weeks of racing.
During the Tour itself, TrainingPeaks becomes part of our daily decision-making platform,
allowing us to compare planned versus actual workload, adjust nutrition strategies, monitor
rider feedback and manage recovery between stages.
Q: What specific data metrics or tools within TrainingPeaks are absolute keys
to your team’s Grand Tour preparation?
While “traditional” metrics such as CTL and Training Stress remain important, our focus is on
metrics that directly reflect the demands of Grand Tour racing, those depend, of course, on
the type of rider we are analyzing (i.e Sprinter vs GC)
Key indicators include:
- Weekly climbing meters accumulated during preparation.
- Weekly KJ expenditure benchmarks compared against historical Tour de France demands.
- Progression of chronic training load to ensure riders reach a minimum conditioning level before selection.
- Climb detection and route analysis tools to quantify the physiological demands of upcoming mountain stages.
- Daily athlete-reported metrics including RPE, wellness scores taken from devices synced to Trainingpeaks and qualitative rider comments, which provide essential context behind the physiological data, as the combination of objective performance metrics and subjective athlete feedback provides the most complete picture of a rider readiness.
Jayco AlUla uses Climb Detection in TrainingPeaks to isolate key ascents and understand how riders perform when the gradient kicks up. You can use it, too, with TrainingPeaks Analyze 360, to review detected climbs from your own workouts, compare climbing stats across activities, and see where the route demanded your biggest efforts.
Q: What are the key physiological indicators to you as a coach that your athletes are peaking and preparing in the right way?
Peak form is rarely identified by a single metric. Instead, we look for alignment across several
indicators, and that depends on the rider type. The best indicator of peak form is when a rider
can repeatedly perform the required work or power output (sprint or climb) with a minimun
requirement of fatigue.
Q: How do you translate rider data into real-world performance on the road?
When I look at the power our riders can sustain on their time trial bikes, combined with the
torque they produce and the duration they can hold it, I’m not simply looking at watts on a
screen. What I’m really seeing is speed.
Those numbers tell us whether we can achieve the velocity required to execute a winning team time trial strategy, keep the formation intact, and deliver every rider to the finish with the lowest possible physiological cost. In a team time trial, the goal isn’t producing the highest power—it’s converting every watt into free speed and
collective efficiency.
Explore more WorldTour coaches, listen to exclusive Q&As, and ride the Tour de France virtually in the We Speak Peak Tour Hub.
