UCI WorldTour races, the premier men's elite road cycling tour, are grueling events that put physical fitness and endurance of riders to the test. The coaches of Team Jumbo-Visma have long been responsible for predicting the energy needs of each rider of the Dutch team for every race on the calendar. Those must be estimated to ensure riders have the energy and resources necessary to maintain a high level of performance throughout a race. This task, however, is both time-consuming and challenging, as it requires precise estimates of race speed and power output. Traditionally, the approach to predicting energy needs has relied on judgement and experience of coaches, but this method has its limitations and often leads to inaccurate predictions. In this paper, we propose a new, more effective approach to predicting energy needs for cycling races. By predicting the speed and power with regression models, we provide the coaches with calorie needs estimates for each individual rider per stage instantly. In addition, we compare methods to quantify uncertainty using conformal prediction. The empirical analysis of the jackknife+, jackknife-minmax, jackknife-minmax-after-bootstrap, CV+, CV-minmax, conformalized quantile regression, and inductive conformal prediction methods in conformal prediction reveals that all methods achieve valid prediction intervals. All but minmax-based methods also produce sufficiently narrow prediction intervals for decision-making. Furthermore, methods computing prediction intervals of fixed size produce tighter intervals for low significance values. Among the methods computing intervals of varying length across the input space, inductive conformal prediction computes narrower prediction intervals at larger significance level.

Elite cyclists are using artificial intelligence to get precise estimates of how many calories they will need for each stage of endurance races such as the Tour de France. Riders burn around 6000 calories a day during the Tour and food is so important to success that most teams employ numerous chefs and nutritionists.