Tour de France 2026: Tadez Pogacar – with Eminem-like haircut – could win record fifth Tour title

The Tour de France begins when most of the sports world’s focus is on the FIFA World Cup.

Sixteen years have passed since Barcelona’s then midfield maestro Andres Iniesta led Spain to their first World Cup title.

Now he presides over the NSN cycling team, which competes in its first Tour de France and begins its mission in the city that holds Iniesta’s legendary status.

Iniesta has one of the best riders in the sprinter Girmay, but he also has to deal with the headache of trying to run a cycling team that doesn’t have the free-market TV rights cashflow of the sport he named.

“Once you see the game from the inside, it’s absolutely fascinating,” Iniesta said in a pre-race press conference. “From the outside, you see most of the riders, but you don’t see all the tricks and hard work that goes on behind the scenes. That’s what surprised me the most.

“We’ve tried to create values ​​for our team. I think fans can love our team because we’re trying to do something special.”

New ways to monetize cycling so that teams don’t have to rely solely on sponsors continue to be discussed.

So are sporting efforts to avoid doping from cycling.

The International Testing Agency is conducting a feasibility study to use power data as part of its anti-doping strategy.

The Swiss group in charge of anti-doping for cycling’s world governing body, the UCI, is working with five teams to collect data aimed at supporting more traditional methods of blood and urine analysis through athlete biological passports.

There is some skepticism within cycling as to whether such an approach would be of any additional benefit to a sport that has not had a major doping controversy for more than five years.

But while low-level riders are still catching up and average speeds are increasing in major races, cycling, scarred by past scandals, has never fully gone away with the problem of creating and maintaining a clean image.