Revista de Medicina Desportiva (English) September 2018 | Page 4

Rev. Medicina Desportiva informa, 2018; 9(5):2
Professor José Santos
Sports director of the cycling team
Boavista
You are the sports director
of the Boavista cycling team.
For how many years have
you been around? How many
Tours (Volta) of Portugal
have you done? Do you have
any idea how many kms
you already drove following
behind the cyclists?
My connection to cycling comes
from my childhood, because of
the affinities with my father, whose
name was Império dos Santos, with
the sport, and by the fact that he
was a good cyclist. There is always
an affective bond with our parents’
likes and skills. This year it was my
40 th Volta, two as a cyclist, six as a
journalist and 32 as a sports director.
About the total of kms, at an average
of 40,000 per year, I think I already
have over one million and a half of
Kms on the road.
Medical support has been improv-
ing, but in the past...
Cycling always lived under the
culture of ancestral knowledge, based
on passing from one generation to
another of small recipes, most of
them related to recovery and others,
unfortunately, with magic potions
to give more force. Currently, the
teams have a medical team advising
cyclists, even about their physical
preparation.
How can you feed and hydrate a
cyclist on a 200-km stage?
It’s an important job, especially on
a sports event by stages. We know
that, the better the level of hydration
of the athlete, the better recovery
will be. For a team of seven cyclists,
like this year on the Volta, we’ve
got about 200 bidons daily. Most
2 september 2018 www.revdesportiva.pt
of them are water, a fourth part of
are salts (sports drink). The coolers
should be very cold to provide the
athlete with a better fresh hydration.
Halfway through the stage, we also
give gelatin, which goes with the
food supplement.
The food nowadays basically
includes energy bars and gels, one or
two bananas, and we still give ver-
micelli with dry fruits or sweet rice.
For a stage of more than 160 Kms
we give two solid supplies, one taken
from the start in the pockets of the
sweater and the other is distributed
at the hallway of the stage.
At the end, one of the biggest con-
cerns is hydration. First, they have of
alkaline water, a recovery liquid and,
sometimes, they have watermelon
that helps as well.
Cycling has been associated with
doping... not quite, is it?
Cycling has been over the years the
pioneering sport in the fight against
doping, and, because of this, it has
been exposed too much. There are
many sports that don’t yet have a
biological passport, for example, and
cycling has adopted this measure of
control for many years. The anti-
doping agencies take cycling as a
guinea pig. There is a differentiated
treatment between cycling and the
other sports. As ann example of how
cycling is treated differently was
the investigation Operation Puerto, in
Spain, which involved hundreds of
athletes, including the best tennis
players in that country, great foot-
ball players, but only cyclists were
penalized.
It is said that not a syringe can be
carried...
It is prohibited for any doctor or
paramedic of a cycling team to carry
a syringe, which also shows, in some
way, a different treatment in rela-
tion to other sports. You can’t run
after having a local injection. On this
Volta to Portugal the teams were
visited five times by the anti-doping
teams: after completing the stage
three times and twice very early in
the morning. To no other sport this
happens. This was aggravated by the
fact that these doping controls dis-
turbed rest, recovery and the func-
tion of the teams, since they were
carried during competition. In most
of the cases, these checks ended
around 23.00 hours, with interfer-
ence of the cyclists’ dinner.
And about supplements. Are they
really needed?
First, I think that a proper diet is
the basis of a good recovery. Then,
rest and the accomplishment of
the training plan, and, only then,
the supplements are the measures
for good performance. Without the
three points I mentioned in the first
place, no matter how many supple-
ments the athlete takes, they won’t
supply his insufficiencies. The sup-
plements are a good complement of
an extended preparation plan.
You must have a lot of stories on
the cycling. Do you want to share
some?
Cyclists deserve my respect. Once,
on the Tour of Asturias (Spain), it
was very cold and there was snow,
rain. In a dense fog, I detected a
cyclist of my team, on a hill descent,
he was stopped, but still on the bike,
with one foot on the ground. His
hands were freeze and he couldn’t
feel his fingers. He had taken off his
gloves and urinated on his hands to
warm them.