UAE Team Emirates XRG described it this way: “21 stages. Every night on the Pod by Eight Sleep. Throughout this Giro, our team has been averaging 9 to 10 hours of sleep: cooler, deeper, and more consistent than ever experienced during a Grand Tour. In a three-week race, quality sleep becomes a decisive performance factor.” The Pod by Eight Sleep is how that happens.
Louis Tu’s title is Sleep Technician. His role is The Night Shift, fully inside UAE Team Emirates XRG for every stage of the 2026 Giro d’Italia, Tour de France, and Vuelta a España. Each evening he arrives at the next hotel ahead of the riders, installs a Pod in every room, calibrates the temperature profiles, and has everything broken down and packed before the team finishes breakfast. Then he moves on to the next city and does it again, for 63 consecutive nights. This is what that looks like from the inside.
The team is four stage wins into the Giro and there has been a Pod in every room for each of them. Most days, Louis and the riders never cross paths at all. That is the design.
“I set up the beds when they are racing, and take them down when they are at breakfast.”
Q&A with Louis Tu, The Night Shift by Eight Sleep
- Describe the job in one sentence.Every day, while the riders are out racing, I get to the hotel first and set up their beds, making sure the recovery environment is optimised and adapted to each person’s preferences.
- Walk us through a part of your day? The transfer between hotels can run to three hours, and every property throws something different at you. Sometimes the lift is too small for the equipment, or the riders are spread across several floors with no obvious logic to it. Staying methodical has been the thing that keeps everything ready in time and still leaves room to deal with whatever goes wrong.
- Some nights you’re troubleshooting hub connections at 11pm. What does that actually look like? I check the app while the riders are at dinner, which means I can sort any last-minute issues before they come back to their rooms. A Pod going offline usually comes down to something fairly specific: the power being tied to a room card, or the Wi-Fi signal not holding steady enough. Every morning I go round and ask each rider how the night went. That feedback matters. By day three they had all worked out which temperatures suited them at different points in the night.
- Igor told you “it’s the best sleep I’ve had in all Giro, 10 hours”. What went through your head? That was actually on the first rest day, so a couple of days before he won the stage rather than the morning of it. But it was good to hear. What the Pods are giving the riders, above anything else, is consistency in an environment that is constantly changing. A new hotel every night, different air conditioning, different room layout. That is really the whole point of the job.
- Narváez had a high Sleep Fitness Score the night before Stage 4: his first win. Does the data change how you watch the race?The riders are sleeping well consistently, with the natural exception being the night after a particularly hard day or a stage win, when they tend to be more restless. But when I look at the metrics in the morning and see them holding close to nine hours of uninterrupted sleep, it does give me a quiet confidence that they are going to feel sharp.
- Bjerg didn’t want to use the Pod at the start of the race. What changed? He skipped the first night. The thing is, the hotels along the route all have completely different climates and ventilation setups, and one evening his room was particularly warm. He decided to try the Pod that night, and that was that. Every rider ended up using the cooling function once the heat varied enough to make it matter.
- On the first rest day, the team let you ride in the car during the training ride. What was that like? What struck me immediately was how far removed their recovery pace is from anything most cyclists would experience. They were rolling at 40-plus kilometres per hour at very low cadence and looking entirely unbothered by it. At one point an amateur spotted them and tried to hold their wheel, going absolutely flat out, and was gone within seconds. Even on a rest day, they are operating at the top 1% of the 1%.
- You’re embedded inside the team bubble: their hotels, their corridors, their rooms. What have you seen that no camera crew would ever get access to? You get to know people properly when you spend that much time together on the road, and what comes through is how genuinely tight the whole group is. The wins are celebrated all the way through the staff, not just among the riders. There are so many people working out of sight to make sure the riders can perform. The team functions as a single organism, and everyone feels the good days and the hard ones the same way, whether they are on the bike or not.
- UAE Team Emirates XRG lost three riders before Stage 3, then won three stages anyway. What did those hotel corridors feel like after each win? When Narváez won it felt surreal, even though winning is something this team has become accustomed to. After the crash in Bulgaria the confidence never really wavered. The focus shifted from the overall classification toward stage wins, but the level of ambition stayed exactly where it was. I watched Arrieta win Stage 5 in a hotel room with two soigneurs and a mechanic, and the atmosphere in that room was extraordinary. Cheering for a rider from the outside is one thing, but when you are inside the bubble and you have watched everything that goes into it, the win feels earned in a way that is hard to explain.
