Tour de France 2026: Pogba makes history, cycling adds anti-doping and popularity grows

The Tour de France has an unforgettable history.

“He knows what the record is,” Lance Armstrong said on social media following Sunday’s result, referring to Pogacar.

In the year The American record of seven Tour de France victories between 1999 and 2005 has been erased from the annals. His systematic doping.

And those in the sport have since avoided mentioning his name.

But the International Testing Agency (ITA) told BBC Sport that night-time anti-doping tests during this year’s tour were being carried out as a “special operation” and again raised questions in a sport where time is of the essence.

Attempting at such an anti-social hour is rare and requires extra permission, and some suspect Jonas Wingegaard may have been responsible for the Tour-final crash after waking up at 2am the previous night and Pogacar himself at 5am.

Others were tested at night and all riders were tested during the race. But what did ITA want?

They don’t say specifically, but one possible explanation for the nighttime testing of professional cyclists seems to be to gather as much information as possible to understand the micro-documents. Endorsed by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), cycling is where an athlete takes small doses of performance-enhancing drugs, such as the red blood cell booster EPO or anabolic steroids, to avoid detection of an athlete’s biological passport.

No error feedback from Pogacar, Vingegard, or any of those tested at night this year.

Previous findings by WADA have shown that micro-dosing can escape detection, and therefore there remains scope for cheating in professional sports, meaning that every effort must be made to prevent anyone from defeating the system.

The ITA could not confirm when the tourism tests would be announced, but Jonathan Vaughters, head of EF Education-Easy Post, told BBC Sport: “Doubts? Actually (those tests) will clear my doubts.”

Vaughters, who was doped during his riding career, has now recovered.

At this year’s race, “If we had done a 24-hour test when the EPO test was introduced in 2001, a lot of riders, including myself, would have been excluded from the sport.”

“So I mean, if we didn’t have to go through Lance Armstrong… the problem would have been solved right away in 2000.”

“If you introduce a sufficient amount of peptide hormone, the clearance time can be four hours – if you take it at 11 o’clock, it will be out of the system by 3 o’clock in the morning, so it makes a difference. Testing technology is developing rapidly.

“If you want to see a pure sport, look at cycling, most other sporting endeavors are an absolute joke.

“Why is cycling so focused? History. This is human F1 car racing; this is the pinnacle of human performance; boundaries are always being pushed.”

Many riders and crew chiefs don’t approach the ‘D’ word, and the consensus is ‘what you see is believing’ as Pogcar accelerates and occasionally, wins by a few minutes, while others do their own amazing feats in the saddle.