Team Great Britain coach Rod Ellingworth believes his squad training in heat chambers to acclimatise to the Doha heat may be the key in seeing Mark Cavendish win a second Rainbow Jersey on Sunday.

“We had them in a heat chambers, or a heated room, doing simple turbo sessions,” GB road coach Rod Ellingworth told Cycling Weekly. “You can cut down the acclimatisation time by exposing yourself to those temperatures at light intensities.”

Ellingworth says that pre time trial, cooling vests will help, but in the road race, there is no such luxury and it will be all about fluid intake.

“In the TT, you can use the cooling vests beforehand, but that only lasts for so long, in the road race it won’t,” said Ellingworth. “It’s just about getting enough fluids in them and getting drinks to them at the right time.”

He says the riders are used to riding in the heat, but says this heat seems to be different from the conditions they experience when racing Down Under or at the Tour in July.

“The lads race a lot in the hot weather, but this seems to be really like a piercing heat. It’s hard to sit in the car and know [how it feels], but the lads in the team time trial seemed to cope with it well, but it was hot and the intensity of the heat was there. There were comments after the team time trial, ‘I never sweated as much as this’. They were wet completely through.”