More than a decade on from Lance Armstrong’s disgrace, cycling is still unable to shake the shadows of its past. The sport’s paranoia over doping and its inability to ever truly prove itself has been in the spotlight again this week, as a result of some unusual measures to combat doping which have possibly had unintended consequences.
Two-time Tour de France champion Jonas Vingegaard and race leader and four-time winner Tadej Pogacar were both woken in the small hours of Sunday for out-of-hours doping tests. Visma-Lease a Bike’s Vingegaard was woken up at 2am, Pogacar at 5am; the latter said he could not get back to sleep afterwards. The tests occurred mere hours before a difficult mountain stage heading to the hors-categorie climb of Plateau de Solaison in the Alps, a key point in the three-week race.
