Tadej Pogacar said that you just have to "eat food like a robot and go with the flow" when explaining his Tour de France preparation and strategy.
Preparation for the Tour has changed immeasurably over recent years, with fuelling one of the major areas of development.
Another is a rider's physical form at the start of the race.
Around 10 years ago, when Briton Chris Froome was in his pomp, he used to arrive at a Grand Tour slightly 'under-cooked' and would aim to ride himself into peak form by the third week.
"I had always planned to build into the race and finishing stronger than I started," Froome said in 2018 after he won the Giro d'Italia.
He had arrived at the race slightly overweight and short of form, and started the final week almost five minutes behind race leader Simon Yates.
But while his compatriot Yates cracked on the penultimate mountain stage, Froome came on stronger and stronger to take the victory.
But such a tactic of riding into form has long been abandoned.
"This was in the past, like 20 years ago, when they were aiming that the shape will grow to the last week," Pogacar said after his victory on Monday's stage from Granollers in Spain to Les Angles.
"These days you need to come (with) the best shape possible in the start of the Tour and you go with it.
"You try to recover every day as much as possible, eat food like a robot, and just go with the flow."
Gorging on food is another major change in Tour preparation.
In Froome's day, riders would deprive their bodies of sugars during training to try to lose weight and encourage the body to use fat for energy.
"Two eggs for breakfast and we were off for five-six hours of training, with water in the bottles. We were exhausted the whole time," Yates, who is now retired, had recalled last year.
But that ran the risk of running out of energy, as happened to Yates at the 2018 Giro.
EAT AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE
When Warren Barguil started out as a professional in 2013, the idea was "to eat as little as possible to not put on weight."
"Now, it's to eat as much as possible to have as much energy as possible," the 34-year-old Frenchman said before the Tour.
On the most arduous mountain stages, riders could burn as many as 7 000 calories a day.
Olympic champion Remco Evenepoel, who started his professional career in 2019, said before the Tour that the biggest change he had seen since starting out was "the fuelling strategies, like the food and the drinks that we take on the bikes".
"It's not a secret any more that everybody is taking a very high intake of sugars, of carbs.
"This is something that helps us to not run out of energy if you do it well."
Julien Louis, the nutritionist for the Decathlon CMA CGM team, who used to work for Liverpool Football Club, told AFP last year that riders need to take on 120 grammes of carbohydrates per hour while racing.
"It's the equivalent of six bananas or around 200 grammes of dried pasta per hour," said Louis.
Keeping fully fuelled would have been even harder in years gone by when Tour stages were generally longer.
"We don't have 240km stages with five or six climbs and 6 000-metres of elevation gain any more," explained Barguil.
He said that the biggest risk for riders was thinking too much about the course and not enough about eating.