At the end of each stage, Richard Carapaz usually stays with the physiotherapist first and then with the osteopath, then goes to dinner and, usually late, retires to his room to sleep. It is a normal hotel room with one exception: an hour before he goes to bed, a machine with built-in Artificial Intelligence —Autopilot, it is called— starts up and, through a hose that connects to tubes with sensors that are distributed throughout the bedspread, regulates the water to the required temperature. It is the wonder of Eight Sleep, a company that has been working with EF since last year, which allows sleep to be improved and the vital signs of the runner to be monitored.
Every day, early in the morning, the EF workers put Carapaz’s quilt in the hotel where they spend the night, a product that costs around 5,000 euros and requires a monthly subscription. The same goes for James Shaw – previously worn by Rui Costa in the Vuelta, but he retired due to a fall in the first few days – who also has the device. Although, for now, this is not the case for the rest of the team, since the factory only makes it for double beds and this is a logistical problem for the team, since it rents six rooms for the riders when it wants them to be four doubles with single beds to reduce costs. But these two cyclists are controlled by a fine motor, an experience that they began to test last year in the training camp in Andorra, in the Tour and the Dauphiné, as well as this year in the same races and the Vuelta and the Tour de Suisse.
The regulation of the desired temperature creates a microclimate in the bed to keep it cool or warmer, depending on the needs of the rider. “We want them not to use the air conditioning because this way you avoid them catching a cold, getting dry or even getting sick,” they say from the EF. A temperature that is established by Artificial Intelligence, which takes more or less 30 days to adapt to the cyclist’s body and needs. All the riders on the team do have the quilt in their private home. Fortunately for their partners, the bed is divided into two and can regulate the desired temperature for each one.
Although the cover controls many more things, because in addition to the presence sensors, it has environmental and biometric sensors, which use algorithms to take data such as chest vibrations, heartbeats and breathing to determine health and sleep stage metrics. Or, in other words, it measures heartbeats, pulse variability, breathing times, snoring, pulse and REM, deep and light sleep phases. Data that doctors check every morning using an App on their mobile phone that they have installed and that they compare with the Whoop —a bracelet that all runners wear—, where there are three notable variables. “The pulse, the recovery and the energy they have spent during the day,” they reveal from the staff of the EF. Which, in the event of irregular or low values, soon determines whether a runner is incubating the flu, Covid… Sweet and monitored dreams, then.
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