Tour de France 2026: Pogacar makes history, cycling steps up anti-doping, and popularity grows
The Tour de France has a checkered history that cannot be forgotten.
“He knows what the record is,” Lance Armstrong said on social media after Sunday’s result, referring to Pogacar.
The American pilot’s record of seven Tour de France victories between 1999 and 2005 has long been erased from the record books after it was revealed that he was systematically doping.
And those within the sport have carefully avoided mentioning his name ever since.
But nightly anti-doping tests during this year’s Tour were carried out as an “exceptional operation”, the International Testing Agency (ITA) told BBC Sport, and with time of the essence it has once again raised questions in a sport that does not need them thanks to its murky past.
Testing at such anti-social hours is rare and requires additional permission, and some suspect it may have been a factor in Jonas Vingegaard’s crash ending the Tour after being woken up at 2am the night before, and Pogacar also waking up at 5am.
Others were also tested at night and all drivers were tested during the race. So what was ITA up to?
They don’t say this specifically, but one possible explanation for the nightly testing of professional cyclists seems to be to gather as much information as possible to try to understand microdosing. This is where an athlete can take very small amounts of performance-enhancing drugs, such as the red blood cell stimulant EPO or anabolic steroids, to avoid detection on the Athlete Biological Passport, which is approved by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) and used in cycling.
There is no suggestion of wrongdoing by Pogacar, Vingegaard or any of those tested on the night this year.
Past findings produced by Wada indicate that microdosing can evade detection methods and therefore there remains scope for cheating in professional sport, meaning every effort should be made to ensure no one can beat the system.
The ITA cannot confirm when the results of the Tour tests will be made public but EF Education-Easypost boss Jonathan Vaughters told BBC Sport: “Doubts? Actually [those tests] Solve my doubts.”
Vaughters, who had been doping throughout her equestrian career, has now recovered.
He said of this year’s race: “If it had been the 24-hour test in 2001 when EPO tests were first introduced, we would have left a lot of drivers out of the sport, including myself. “And that would have saved 25 years of drama.
“So we wouldn’t have had to turn to Lance Armstrong… The problem would have been solved immediately in 2000.
“If you give a low enough dose of the peptide hormone, the clearance time can be four hours; if you take it at 11 a.m. it’s out of the system by 3 a.m., so it makes a difference. Testing technology is improving rapidly.”
“If you want to watch a clean sport, cycling, the testing for most other sports is a complete joke.
“Why is cycling so hyper-focused? History. This is human F1 car racing; this is the limit of human performance; limits will always be pushed.”
Many riders and team bosses don’t even go near the ‘D’ word and the consensus is ‘believe what you see’ when Pogacar accelerates and wins, sometimes within minutes, and others show off their own remarkable skills in the saddle.
