As Adelaide rolls out the welcome mat to cycling world for Tour Down Under, I feel ashamed

Sweat rolls off my brow as my legs roll powerless beneath me. Eyes fixed on my glowing bike computer screen, watching as my heart rate climbs faster than the power that can be produced by my legs. 150, 160, 170bpm. How long has that been? I wipe the bead of sweat obscuring the timer. Only five minutes.

I can barely squeeze in each breath, and the walls feel like they’re closing in. Yes, walls. Because it’s not the sun’s glare making this ride unbearable. Outside, it’s freezing. It’s October. But inside, we’re sealed within sterile white walls and glass windows glistening with condensation, sweat puddling on the floor.

This is the heat chamber, and for many professional cyclists it has become an integral part of training. Such a punishing ordeal feels far removed when it’s raining outside. But we’re not training for today’s weather. We’re training for conditions still to come.

When I was preparing for my first Olympics in Tokyo in 2021, heat training was still something of a niche, a “one percenter” reserved for the most elite. But sport is evermore becoming a game of science.

The science says that performing at peak intensity in the heat can affect the body in drastic and damaging ways. It also says the climate is getting hotter.

As temperatures continue to soar, heat training has gone from a niche advantage to a non-negotiable – especially when preparing for an event like this week’s Tour Down Under in South Australia.

In the 26 years since the Tour Down Under began in 1999, the number of January days over 41C in Adelaide have almost tripled compared with the previous 26-year period.

Every year, Adelaide rolls out the welcome mat to the cycling world, promising summer sunshine and roads that ribbon from beaches to hills. As a local girl, it fills me with a fierce pride. The opportunity to welcome the world to my training grounds, to show them the climbs and the bakeries and the backroads that I love.

But, as the years go on, I feel ashamed.

It’s like hosting international friends in a house that is visibly on fire. Don’t look at that, we say. Look at the spectacle. Look at the sunshine. As international guests, they don’t always know any different. But we do.

I’ve been racing in the Tour Down Under on and off since 2018. Each year, the event has been animated not just by the racing itself, but the environment we compete in.

I remember my first Tour, being the youngest rider in the race, and my first time in the international peloton. Three hours in, a European rider beside me looked dazed, then drifted straight off the road into a ditch. Heat cooks your senses. In a sport where reaction time can be the difference between staying upright and a serious crash, that matters. The heat can even be the deciding factor between winners, losers, and did-not-finishers.

A few years later, in 2021, I was racing for the national team in a criterium in Victoria Park. Behind us, plumes of smoke rose from the hills. We were told the fire was contained and safe, so we kept riding, but every few laps I couldn’t help glance over my shoulder. It’s a strange feeling, racing while part of your home is up in flames in the background. Wondering if any of your friends are affected, your training roads, the parks you love. It feels wrong.

Cycling’s governing bodies are starting to notice, too. Extreme heat protocols and safety policies are becoming harder to ignore, because the problem has become bad enough to require rules.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: if we applied strict heat cutoffs consistently, whole chunks of racing would be at risk. Applying Cycling SA’s policy of cancellation over 37C, for example, would have resulted in 25 cancelled Tour Down Under race stages by now. If we continue on this trajectory, the race itself is at risk.

Of course, extreme conditions don’t only affect the competitors. Cycling tourism brings a massive influx of people who line the roadsides and enjoy the place. Unlike sports played in stadiums, cycling goes to the regions, bringing lines to local bakeries and old general stores. The cruel irony is that what I’m describing hits those regions hardest.

While athletes are being trained and educated about the dangers of pushing ourselves in extreme heat, we need help addressing the cause, not just managing the symptoms. It’s up to the South Australian government to use the platform it has created through our state’s biggest sporting events – the Tour Down Under, international tennis, LIV Golf, AFL’s Gather Round – to nudge sponsors and spectators toward choices that protect the state, rather than quietly cook it.

A good first step would be to replace the fossil fuel sponsorship of the Tour Down Under. You cannot sell health, human performance, and the future, while promoting businesses that actively undermine that future.

Back in the heat chamber, sweating in a controlled box to prepare for a hotter world, I keep coming back to the same irony: the most coordinated response to climate change in sport, so far, is to get athletes better at surviving it.

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