Every stage of a Grand Tour has, and will, end the same way for most riders: cross the line, grab some cherry juice, drain it. The NYT just noticed Premier League players catching on. Here's what the rest of the sporting world is finally learning.
Florian Wirtz got subbed off during Liverpool's opener at Newcastle, sat down on the bench, and cracked open a bottle of dark red liquid. The Athletic (NYT) wrote a whole piece on it, and now people are asking, "Wait, they're drinking what?" What The Times didn't dig into: where that liquid actually comes from, and why the pro peloton's been drinking it for years before football caught on.
The Peloton Had It First
The red stains and secret bottles have been showing up at the Tour for years; onlookers were not always sure if it's from a crash or just a rider gulping something too fast. What started as a bit of recovery curiosity developed into a sport-wide custom, with pro teams like Visma-Lease a Bike and EF Pro Cycling religiously downing a bottle the second they roll across the finish line.
"We've been using it for years — the team's been using it for a long time, even before I joined," Matteo Jorgenson told Cycling Weekly. "I think it works well."
EF's team doctor, David Hulse, says tart cherry extract showed up in the pro peloton over a decade ago and is now everywhere in the sport, mainly for cutting the inflammation that piles up when you're racing 21 days straight and can't afford to show up off the mark on stage 15.
Football, among other mainstream sports, is only just getting the memo. Merijn Zeema, former Visma-Lease a Bike sporting director, jumped to Eredivisie club AZ and brought cherry juice with him. He explained that the shift only really picked up in the last two years. Teams occasionally reached out for advice or product information, but now, from the Premier League to the Eredivisie to the Middle East, manufacturers are receiving calls directly to set up partnerships and consultations.
The Science Behind Cherry Juice
Montmorency and other sour cherry varieties are loaded with anthocyanins, a type of polyphenol that blunts oxidative stress — the muscle-fiber micro-damage that both drives adaptation and causes the soreness that wrecks a fast turnaround. Northumbria University researchers first identified the effect in a 2010 marathon-runner study, and it's since been confirmed across other sports and picked up by Team GB ahead of the 2012 Olympics.
Worth noting: the evidence is strongest for repeated-effort scenarios, like stage races, tournament weeks, congested fixture lists, and not necessarily a one-off outing. One hard session and done, don't expect much. Stack hard days on hard days, and that's where cherry juice makes a difference.
Where Amacx Gets Its Cherries
Not all cherry juices are created equal. Amacx CEO Gino Vierhouten personally tracks cherry harvests across Europe — watching weather and crop reports the way a race director tracks a forecast — to source the specific Montmorency cherry variety with the highest polyphenol content. He won't say exactly where this year's batch comes from. In an industry this competitive, that's now commercially sensitive information.
What Amacx will say: instead of marketing a cherry count (which swings from harvest to harvest and tells you nothing about actual dose), Cherry Juice+ is standardized to 125mg of anthocyanins per bottle, every batch, regardless of how any given harvest turned out. The formula also stacks in European black elderberry and blackcurrant extract alongside the tart cherry, plus 30g of carbs and 500ml of fluid. Inflammation, glycogen, and rehydration in one bottle.
Why the Pros Actually Use This One
Amacx isn't just selling into the sport; it's embedded in it, as the nutrition partner for both Visma-Lease a Bike and EF Pro Cycling, and the official recovery nutrition partner for IRONMAN. That's product going straight to riders at the finish line of the biggest race in the sport, refined on feedback from those teams' own medical staff.
It's also why Amacx already had a football-specific answer ready when clubs came calling: cherry gummies. Players told Amacx's team they didn't want to chug half a liter of juice after being subbed off in the 65th minute, and traveling with liquids through airport security for a Champions League away leg is its own headache. The gummy carries the same dose, minus the fluid. Amacx nutritionist Julie Hardeel adds that dark cherries naturally contain melatonin too, something useful when your job has you finishing games at 11 p.m. and needing to fall asleep fast.
So while some are just catching on to players sipping dark red juice on the bench or in the locker room, the Tour peloton has been running this protocol for over a decade, and it's sitting on our shelves available to anyone.
