Can You Fuel a World Championships From a Suitcase?

Emma Finucane is preparing for a World Championships in Shanghai and, among the usual race kit, part of that preparation apparently includes protein shakes, bars, camping meals and tins of tuna.

That came from comments she made before the championships after British riders were warned to be careful about what they eat and drink in China. Meat, fish, eggs and dairy have reportedly been among the foods they have been told to avoid, along with the obvious warning over tap water.

None of that sounds especially dramatic until it is put next to the way a modern track programme prepares for a World Championships.

The bike will have been tested. The tyres will have been chosen. The chain will have been prepared. Training load will have been controlled for weeks, travel timed around recovery, positions checked, race schedules mapped out and almost every variable that can be controlled removed as early as possible.

Then somebody has to work out what the rider is going to eat for ten days.

The warning itself is easy enough to understand.

Anti-doping organisations have warned athletes travelling to China about the risk of clenbuterol contamination in meat for years. UK Anti-Doping has told athletes to plan their nutrition before travelling and to take particular care over meat. Germany's NADA gives similar advice, while Australian guidance also identifies China as one of the countries where contaminated meat can present a problem.

For an athlete operating under strict liability, nobody is going to take much convincing to be cautious. A meal that would be completely unremarkable for a tourist looks rather different when a positive test can follow from something the athlete never knowingly took.

British Cycling telling its riders to be careful is not difficult to defend.

What becomes harder to understand is how far the answer has apparently travelled towards food being packed in the luggage.

A protein shake is straightforward. So is a bar. Both are familiar, measurable and easy to carry, and a national programme can make sure the products have been batch tested before anybody gets on the aircraft.

Feeding a rider through a World Championships is not quite the same thing.

Track riders are not arriving in Shanghai, racing once and going home. They are training before competition, dealing with the time difference, racing repeated rounds, recovering between sessions and then trying to do it again the following day.

A sprinter could move through team sprint before racing kilometre, individual sprint and keirin. An endurance rider may have qualifying rounds, finals and bunch events spread across the week. The work between races does not disappear simply because the television coverage has finished for the evening.

They need to eat enough. They need carbohydrate back in. They need food they can tolerate when tired, nervous or jet-lagged. They need to be able to sit down and eat a proper meal rather than spend a championship assembling calories from whatever survived the flight.

None of that means packaged food cannot work. Elite sport is very good at travelling with nutrition, and British Cycling may have a far more complete catering plan than Finucane could ever be expected to explain during a podcast.

But if riders really are relying heavily on food brought from Britain, it is an odd place for preparation to have ended up.

There is an even more practical problem with the tuna.

Shanghai Customs lists animal products that passengers cannot simply carry into China. Meat is restricted, as are dairy products and eggs. Aquatic animal products are on the list as well, with only limited exemptions.

Ordinary tinned tuna does not obviously fit neatly into those exemptions.

British Cycling may already have dealt with that through the correct approvals. If so, there is nothing particularly remarkable about it. The tins become one more item on the freight list.

If not, then the food selected because it feels safe in Britain could be stopped before it ever reaches the team hotel.

That sounds almost too mundane for elite sport, which is probably why it is interesting.

Teams will happily spend months finding half a watt. They will test bars, chains, tyres, helmets and skinsuits until the differences become almost absurdly small. Yet a rider can still arrive at the biggest race of the year with one of the most basic parts of recovery dependent on what can be carried through an airport.

Britain will not be alone in having thought about it.

German athletes have been warned about food contamination in China. Australians have too. Every major programme going to Shanghai will have had to decide what its riders can eat, where it will come from and how much they trust the catering available to them.

That is when the British example stops looking uniquely British.

Some teams will have the staff to make the problem disappear. They can use nutritionists, chefs, controlled suppliers and freight. They can sort paperwork before travelling, speak directly to hotels and bring enough backup food that the riders barely notice anything has changed.

Smaller teams do not necessarily have that option.

A federation travelling with four riders, a coach and a mechanic has the same responsibility to keep its athletes away from a contaminated food source. It does not have the same number of people available to find a replacement.

Track cycling already accepts that money changes what teams can control.

It is obvious when the difference is a bespoke bike, a wind-tunnel programme or a new handlebar. It is less obvious when the difference is whether the rider can eat normally.

Shanghai should tell us quite a lot about how widespread this is.

If Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, France and Japan have all brought food, cooks or their own controlled catering arrangements, then Britain's approach is not unusual at all. It would show that the World Championships has created a food problem and each national programme has been left to build its own answer around it.

If those teams are eating normally from a controlled local supply while British riders are working through camping meals and food packed at home, then Britain's approach deserves much closer attention.

There is no need to decide that before the riders arrive.

The useful part will be seeing how the different teams have actually handled it.

Shanghai has been on the calendar for long enough for training blocks to have been built around it and equipment programmes aimed at it. Nobody has suddenly discovered where the World Championships are being held.

That is why Finucane's comment sticks.

Not because taking a tin of tuna to China is particularly ridiculous, and not because British Cycling is wrong to worry about food contamination. Both of those explanations are too simple.

It sticks because elite track cycling is built around controlling small things before they become performance problems.

Of all the things a World Championships programme has to solve, feeding the riders should not still be one of the difficult ones.

If some of the fastest cyclists in the world are still working out how many tins of tuna they can get through Chinese customs, the system has probably left that problem too close to the rider.