SerpApi.Org
GRENOBLE, France—One night last week, Tour de France leader Tadej Pogacar was fast asleep on the shores of Lake Geneva when he was suddenly awoken by a knock at his hotel-room door. It was 5 a.m. and some people needed to see him urgently.
Pogacar couldn’t exactly tell them to go away. These were officials from the International Testing Agency, and they were there before dawn to carry out a highly unusual doping control.
The four-time Tour champion wasn’t alone. Earlier that same night, his main rival Jonas Vingegaard was also roused from sleep outside normal testing hours for a control around 2 a.m. Over the next 48 hours, the entire peloton was subjected to surprise tests in one of the largest sweeps in the recent history of the Tour de France.
“I accept it if this is necessary to prove that we are riding clean, then I totally accept it,” said Pogacar, who is already tested nearly every day of the race as a multiple-stage winner and holder of the yellow jersey. “I commit to it.”
What made the Pogacar and Vingegaard tests so remarkable is that they took place in the middle of the night, outside the normal 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. window. (Outside of the Tour, riders are required to log their whereabouts every single day to be available for testing on short notice.)
In order to carry out those nighttime controls, the ITA needed to secure permission from the World Anti-Doping Authority and a local judge. The requirement, according to the Union Cycliste Internationale, the sport’s world governing body, is “serious and specific suspicion that the rider may be engaged in doping.”
Precisely what that suspicion remains confidential and the test results are unlikely to be available before the end of the Tour. Within the race bubble, riders and team officials guessed that the tests could be based on anything from concrete evidence of cheating to the simple fact that any exceptional performance in this tormented sport could be viewed as suspicious. To be clear, Pogacar and Vingegaard haven’t been accused of any wrongdoing.
“Because of that history, you’re going to be able to find a French judge who’s going to give you a warrant to exercise that sort of extreme protocol,” said Jonathan Vaughters, the manager of the EF Education-EasyPost team and a former doper turned advocate for clean sport. “This generation is paying for the reputation of the sport previously.”
Cycling did plenty to earn it in the early 2000s—more than a quarter of the Tours this century have seen the winners stripped of their titles for doping violations. Inside the peloton, however, the general view is that cycling is cleaner now than it has been in decades.
Still, one reason to test at night now would be to detect any sophisticated performance-enhancing substances that could clear an athlete’s system in a matter of a few hours.
“It’s good that they test,” said Vingegaard, a two-time champion who crashed the next day and was forced to abandon the Tour. “But when it’s affecting performance and your sleep, I don’t think it’s so good.”
Not everyone was as measured as Vingegaard. Lance Armstrong said on his podcast that “this isn’t a sporting issue now. Two a.m. is a human rights issue.” Slovenian rider Matej Mohoric, meanwhile, complained that he had to be dragged out of bed at 5 a.m., while France’s young prospect Paul Seixas was tested at a more reasonable hour.
“The UCI of course acknowledges that nighttime testing can disrupt riders’ rest and recovery,” the organization said, “and wishes to reiterate that carrying out such controls outside normal hours remains an exceptional measure, reserved for limited and justified circumstances.”
The UCI declined to say what those circumstances were. But for a sport haunted by its own history, the antidoping show of force was designed to breed confidence not doubt.
“If we had had 2 a.m., 4 a.m. testing,” Vaughters said, “we would have had huge numbers of riders immediately banned, including me. And we would have saved the sport 25 years of drama.”
Write to Joshua Robinson at [email protected]