The carbohydrate revolution has begun, and we mean to finish it.
In July the Tour de France was ridden at more than 43 kilometres an hour, faster than ever before. Riders who once ate 60 grams of carbohydrate an hour now eat 120, and on the hardest stages some reportedly ate 140. In London this spring Sabastian Sawe ran the first official marathon under two hours, in 1:59:30, and the company that made his gels says he took 115 grams an hour. In football, UEFA’s experts now tell players to eat six to eight grams of carbohydrate for every kilogram they weigh on the day of a match.
Everyone else was told the opposite. Diet after diet has taken carbohydrate off the plate first. The Sunday papers printed the plans, and the magazines put them on their covers, and bread was sold in bags marked “low carb”.
In 1967, Jonas Bergström and his colleagues took needle samples from the thighs of men on exercise bicycles and found that the men rode longest when their muscles started with the most stored carbohydrate. Fifty years later, elite race walkers who trained hard for three weeks on a ketogenic diet got no faster. The American College of Sports Medicine now advises athletes in the heaviest training to eat up to twelve grams of carbohydrate a day for each kilogram they weigh.
Recovery, meanwhile, has been sold in pieces. A serious athlete’s bag holds tart cherry juice, a protein shake for straight after the session and salt tablets for the water bottle, and the supermarket shelf holds sachets, tubs, gummies and bottled water with a mountain on the label. The salt in the sachets is the salt that dries white on the peak of a cap after a long run, and the powder in most of the tubs is whey.
Fenix is a still drink in a half-litre can. Each can holds thirty-one grams of clear whey protein and sixty of carbohydrate, two parts maltodextrin to one of fructose, with sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, zinc, selenium, iodine and vitamins B, C, D and E. About twenty-two grams of the carbohydrate is sugar. There is no artificial sweetener or gum, and nothing to scoop or shake.
We are at war, and we admit it. It is a war on the misinformation that taught a generation of athletes to fear bread, on the poor performance that follows an empty muscle, and on REDs, the syndrome the International Olympic Committee ties to eating too little for the training, which it estimates affects between 15 and 80 per cent of athletes, depending on the sport.
The big drinks companies have the fridges by the tills, the shelves at eye level, money for television and names people grew up with. More and more of their cans say zero on the front. They will outspend us for years; they will not outlast us.
The can is only the means. The end is a generation of athletes who eat enough for the training they do and say so out loud, until the papers and the shelves follow them.
Another diet will be in the papers next January, and the shelf will be longer by the spring. On a cold morning after a hard session, a runner will still want what runners wanted before anyone told them to give it up: a drink, then a proper meal, and carbohydrate in both.
The first cans are planned for 2027. Performance has a final movement. Join it.