The last winner of the Cycling Tour of Spain lived in a hotel with hypoxic rooms in Alicante to increase the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood and improve his sports performance
A new cycling season starts this month of January and all the dates of the Grand Tours of the World Tour for the International Cycling Union are already on the calendar. One of the big news from a scientific point of view is the move of Belgian runner Remco Evenepoel, winner of the last Cycling Tour of Spain and the last World Cup on the cycling route. The champion has decided to live in Spain. In concrete terms, it seems that he has chosen Calpe and its surroundings. What does this have to do with science? A lot. And with doping? There’s a lot of controversy about it. Quite possibly.
According to various media, Evenepoel prepared the Tour of Spain in Pedreguer, a town thirty kilometers from Calpe. There’s a unique hotel there with hypoxic rooms designed to help cyclists train differently from other runners.
To understand what hypoxic chambers are and how they work, we first need to know that many athletes who practice endurance sports, especially cycling and marathon running, train in places that are at a considerable height above sea level. They spend a long time there because, as altitude increases, the availability of oxygen decreases due to a lower partial pressure of oxygen in the air.
As a result of this oxygen deprivation, the kidneys increase the production and secretion of erythropoietin, a hormone that stimulates the bone marrow to produce red blood cells (erythropoiesis). In this way, high-altitude training causes cyclists to increase the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood, improving their aerobic capacity and sports performance.
But training at altitude is expensive and logistically complex for cycling teams, and also involves long journeys. To make matters worse, the weather in these high-altitude areas is not always the most suitable, nor are the roads ideal for runners. In the end, the cyclists have to descend many kilometers each day to train at a lower altitude and later return to the hotels to sleep and continue their adaptation to the altitude. A mess.
To avoid all these problems, Evenepoel seems to have prepared the Tour of Spain in that hotel in Pedreguer with rooms with hypoxic rooms. These chambers are enclosed spaces that generally have vents made of polyamide mesh (natural polymers – such as wool or silk – or synthetics – such as nylon or Kevlar -).
Indoors, high-altitude conditions are simulated while maintaining a low oxygen concentration. So while the air at sea level contains an average of 20.9% oxygen, in the hypoxic chamber it contains about 12%. On the other hand, the partial pressure of oxygen in the hypoxic chamber is the same as in a hotel in the high mountains. With the additional advantage that the oxygen concentration in the room can be controlled.
The use of these facilities is comfortable because they allow athletes to rest in an environment of simulated altitude (with the direct result of increased red blood cell count, increased hemoglobin production, optimization of some enzymatic activities and sports improvement). And when it’s time to train, they continue to do so at low altitude, where there is an enriched oxygen level and the muscles work normally. All this without having to go up and down the mountain every day and avoid the adverse conditions typical of mountain areas.
So, were the two months he spent at the hotel in Alicante useful for Evenepoel to prepare for the Vuelta a España?
The Belgian rider won the Spanish round, yes, but let’s not forget that correlation does not imply causation. Although no one has been able to prove that this very special form of preparation was the cause of the Belgian runner’s sporting success, Evenepoel is so convinced of its usefulness that he not only moved to Spain, but after buying a house on the coast of Alicante, he has decided to hire an architect to recreate the same conditions in a room as that of the hotel where he stayed, simulating the conditions at almost 4,000 meters altitude.
Whether these cameras really work, the results of the studies conducted so far are not definitive. To obtain definitive results, more studies are needed to homogenize duration and type of exercise, simulated altitude or time of exposure to hypoxia. In addition, the response to low oxygen concentration varies from person to person, so it is difficult to generalize when we talk about training at altitude. What is clear is that any adaptation to hypoxic chambers must be progressive, with adequate mid- and long-term advance planning.
We leave a delicate subject for last. Although the World Anti-Doping Agency does not consider these types of preparations to be doping today, there are many voices in the sporting world that believe that these practices should be banned. The fact that high concentrations of erythropoietin are not produced naturally by the body does not convince them. They think it is equivalent to artificially injecting erythropoietin or using other banned drugs to increase red blood cell production. In fact, these are the reasons why hypoxic chambers are banned in some countries.
On the other hand, there are those who think there is no reason to ban it. And that if the hypoxic chamber is considered doping, then training at altitude should also be considered doping, because it pursues the same goal: forcing the body to produce more erythropoietin.
This article is a version of a text originally published on the author’s blog, Scientia, published in ‘The conversation‘.
Source: La Verdad
I am Shawn Partain, a journalist and content creator working for the Today Times Live. I specialize in sports journalism, writing articles that cover major sporting events and news stories. With a passion for storytelling and an eye for detail, I strive to be accurate and insightful in my work.
