On Tuesday, March 14th, elite rider Kristen Faulkner was disqualified from the Strade Bianche Donne podium for wearing a blood glucose monitor during the race.
In an official statement posted on social media, the US rider, who races with Team Jayco AlUla, added that she hoped the devices would one day be allowed in races.
Kristen Faulkner is not a sponsored athlete of Supersapiens, the manufacturer of the glucose monitoring device used by her. In response to the decision by the event organiser, Supersapiens has issued a statement…
‘Supersapiens fully supports the importance of following rules in UCI-sanctioned events. However, this is an opportunity to better understand why athletes are choosing to use continuous glucose monitors (CGM) and the impact this rule has on athletes who use this technology to support their health.
‘We request that the UCI start to see CGMs and Supersapiens as a tool for athletes to protect their bodies, not as some sort of performance enhancement device. This isn’t about going faster. This is about health.
‘We understand nutrition has a much bigger impact on an athlete than just results. As such, Supersapiens has been funding, supporting, and driving female-specific research into the association between menstrual cycle phases and glucose levels in elite female endurance athletes.
‘Supersapiens invites the UCI to work together around a research collaboration to collectively establish data sets and continued scientific learnings with the goal of designing science-based best practices for optimizing nutrition and recovery and mitigating eating disorders.
‘The goal of this campaign would be to build out educational tools together with the UCI that would include but not be limited to webinars, conferences, and other ideal nutrition strategies that the UCI would be able to use to educate coaches, riders, staff, etc across all levels of the organization.
‘Supersapiens will continue to serve all athletes to better understand and quantify nutrition strategies for health as well as performance.’
