The Tour de France dispels the usual suspicions

It was morning, a Sunday morning in mid-July, one of those slightly sticky mornings that start off feeling weary. It was morning when a fear well past its prime – one we thought was long gone – began to grip our stomachs, livers and lungs, exhausting us in a matter of moments as thoroughly as even a few hundred kilometres on a bicycle would. All it took was the news that, during the night between Saturday and Sunday, inspectors from the International Testing Agency (ITA) – the international organisation founded in 2018 at the behest of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and established under the supervision of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) with the aim of promoting independence, expertise and transparency in the fight against doping in sport – had entered the rooms of Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard, first and second in the general classification, for a surprise doping test at the Tour de France. This was a targeted doping test because, in their view, there were “serious and substantial grounds for suspicion”, which is the only reason such tests can be authorised in France between 11 pm and 5 am.

Anyone who has lived out their passion for cycling from the mid-1990s onwards is well accustomed to all this. They’ve already read about certain things – and, above all, they’ve already suffered through them. Or rather, they’re fairly well-accustomed to it. Yet they still feel that tightness in their stomach, liver and lungs. Because those years were difficult, at times tragic, capable of instilling a sad disillusionment, at times a sense of rejection, and undoubtedly the suspicion that everything we’d seen was nothing more than one huge lie.

Was that really the case?

And yet we had actually seen those races, those stages. We still remember many of them.

Those who, for reasons of age, have not lived through all this are witnessing it for the first time. Of course, it is a first time softened by shared memories, by reports, articles and images that are easily accessible, familiar to most, and passed down through the generations. And yet it was the first time. The first time of night-time raids accompanied by those words ‘serious and substantial suspicions’, which bring with them further suspicions.

The fact that cycling has gone to great lengths to restore its credibility; that this sport has managed to devise an effective, albeit imperfect, monitoring system – the biological passport (here is a fact sheet explaining how it works) – that riders have sacrificed so much, first and foremost a large part of their freedom, in order to rid this sport of the stigma that it was nothing more than a sport of dopers, because cyclists have lost their freedom by accepting the obligation to report their whereabouts daily to anti-doping officials for possible spot tests; Well, all of this seems to fade away every time the shadow of doping merges with the shadows of bicycles and riders on the roads, evaporating like drops of a summer drizzle on the scorching tarmac of the Tour de France.

Suspicion is insidious; it carves tiny grooves into the optic nerve until it distorts our ability to perceive what we are observing. Suspicion is an end in itself. It accepts no alternative versions to its own – a dictatorship capable of ruling out the possibility of error. And that question we might ask ourselves but never do: do the runners deserve all this?

“When, in 2019, I suggested the possibility of bringing all sports into line with cycling’s anti-doping standards – in my view, the best system currently in use – I was looked at as if I were mad,” a former WADA executive, who prefers to remain anonymous, told Il Foglio Sportivo. “They told me, with commendable frankness, that if they had proposed to the various international federations that they adopt the same system used in cycling, all hell would have broken loose; that no one would ever have given the green light to mandatory travel notifications and total availability. They told me that this was an invasion of privacy and personal freedom worthy of a totalitarian regime,” he explains. Cyclists have accepted all of this. They have accepted unannounced anti-doping tests, both day and night, including those carried out in addition to the routine tests after the races have finished.

Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard didn’t even complain about the night-time stages at the 2026 Tour de France; they merely pointed out that it wasn’t ideal to be woken up in the middle of the night after completing a stage with 3,800 metres of climbing and with another stage featuring 3,950 metres of climbing to tackle just a few hours later. It was during that stage that Jonas Vingegaard crashed on a downhill section and, as a result of that crash, had to return home with a broken collarbone. Did the lack of sleep play a part? The Dane replied that “the timing was far from ideal”.

What remains of this story is the disappointment of not having been able to watch the Plateau de Solaison stage with the Dane among the leading riders. And not having been able to see him ride up the Alpine climbs, perhaps alongside Tadej Pogacar, perhaps chasing from behind. Who knows.

What remains, however, is above all that tinge of suspicion we felt – perhaps unconsciously, perhaps without even realising it. But that suspicion has returned. Or, perhaps, it never went away. Because over the years, every time a cyclist achieved something marvellous – a feat destined to be remembered for years to come – there were those who dredged up the past, casting doubt on the athletes’ ability to better themselves and to surpass the achievements of the champions of yesteryear. And yet sport has always been about constantly building on what has gone before. It’s strange – and a bit infuriating – that only in cycling does all this seem like a sign of guilt rather than something that happens time and again.