Does cycling really want to fight doping or does it just want to appear to fight doping?

On the eve of stage 15 of the Tour de France, Jonas Vingegaard was woken by anti-doping inspectors at 2am for testing, while Tadej Pogačar was stirred from his sleep shortly after 5am. 

At the start in Champagnole, both riders expressed an understandable degree of frustration with the interruption to their sleep, but they also acknowledged that such tests were in line with current anti-doping regulations. 

Indeed, Vingegaard’s primary concern wasn’t that his sleep had been broken by an unexpected test, but rather that he might have been put at a competitive disadvantage if his rivals’ recovery hadn’t been affected in the same way by similar controls.

It was a typically balanced take from Vingegaard, but that kind of nuance would start to disappear from the conversation when he crashed out of the Tour that afternoon, with Pogačar now wondering aloud if the sleep disruption had contributed to the Dane’s crash.

Tellingly, Visma Lease a Bike sports director Marc Reef was quick to dismiss the idea – “I think it’s not something to speculate about,” he said – but the genie was out of the bottle, and figures from Lance Armstrong to his old bête noire David Walsh were arguing to varying degrees against nighttime testing.

On Monday’s rest day, riders’ union the CPA weighed in on the topic, issuing a statement decrying the nighttime tests to which Vingegaard and Pogačar had been subjected. “The quality of sleep and recovery is essential not only for performance but also for the health and safety of the riders,” read the statement.

The CPA stance on nighttime anti-doping controls would be rather more forceful, however, if their president Adam Hansen hadn’t already objected to an altogether less invasive form of testing.

The ITA is currently conducting a two-year feasibility study into using power data analysis as an additional intelligence tool for its anti-doping programme. Four WorldTour teams, including Vingegaard’s Visma squad, have volunteered to participate, yet in an interview with Domestique’s Hotseat podcast earlier this year, Hansen complained that the study was “extra stress for the athletes” and suggested it would contribute to burn-out.

On Monday, meanwhile, Hansen blunted the impact of his organisation’s reservations on the very specific question of nighttime testing by also outlining a rather scattered list of general complaints about anti-doping in a social media post. 

The key thing to note here is that the provision for nighttime testing has existed under WADA rules since January 2015, and it was even among the recommendations of the Cycling Independent Reform Commission report, the UCI’s underwhelming response to the fall-out from the Armstrong affair that was published in April of that year.

French law at that time prevented any nighttime testing on the 2015 Tour, but it has notionally been available as a tool to testing agencies on the race ever since. The nighttime tests on Pogačar and Vingegaard weren’t new, therefore, but rather the first known application of an anti-doping lever that has been technically available to testers for more than a decade, albeit only with express permission from a judge.

The question of why Pogačar and Vingegaard were subjected to an overnight test ahead of stage 15 isn’t really the pertinent one here, given that one would always expect the very best riders at the Tour to be the focus of testing beyond the usual post-stage anti-doping protocol. The more relevant question is whether such nighttime controls have been carried out before – and if not, why not?

In any case, the seemingly belated implementation of nighttime testing on the 2026 Tour perhaps shouldn’t have come as an undue surprise. On the eve of the race, the ITA published its plans for testing at this year’s race, where it made specific mention of an increased focus on “the endocrine module of the [biological passport] to better detect markers of human Growth Hormone (hGH) abuse.”

Given that certain forms of hGH can have a very short detection window, one can understand the ITA’s reluctance to allow riders a test-free period every night between 11pm and 6am.

In his social media post on Monday, Hansen stated that “modern cycling is drastically cleaner” than yesteryear, but such claims would amount to little more than a leap of faith in the absence of robust, severe and occasionally invasive testing protocols.

Ever since the Festina Affair in 1998, prominent figures have trotted out variations on the old line that “cycling has never been cleaner.” And there are plenty quick to pat themselves on the back because cycling supposedly does more to combat doping than any other sport.

That might even be true, but it requires more than simply putting theoretical provisions for additional testing in the rulebook: those tests also need to be carried out in practice. 

The reaction to the nighttime tests at the weekend thus raises a fundamental question for those speaking out against them – does cycling really want to fight doping or does it just want to appear to fight doping?

EF Education-EasyPost manager Jonathan Vaughters brought some welcome balance to the discourse surrounding nighttime testing on social media on Monday. The former US Postal rider confessed to doping in 2012 and he pointed out that he and many of his contemporaries would already have been caught by nighttime controls had they been available a quarter of a century ago.

“I’ll roll this grenade down the aisle: 2am testing is one of the very effective ways to prevent peptide (EPO, hGH) and testosterone micro dosing. If UCI had tested us in 2001 at 2am? We’d all have been suspended and saved the sport 25 years of drama,” he wrote.

“It’s unfortunate that Tadej and Jonas have to atone for the sh*t we did. However, I’d take some lost sleep for some gained credibility. I should apologize to both of them, honestly.”

Vaughters outlined his stance in greater detail in an interview with Daniel Benson on Tuesday, maintaining that invasive testing was a necessary step to prove cycling’s credibility in the face of constant doubts.

“I was getting a little bit tired of reading all of these internet keyboard warriors criticising how fast Pogačar was going and clearly intimating that he was doping, but we don’t have any proof of that. None. Zero,” Vaughters said.

“To me, any time that you can put a stake in the ground and say here’s a testing method that’s really going to be strongly preventive of micro-dosing, if you can do that and quiet down the peanut gallery… any time you can do that, and re-establish credibility, it’s a good thing.”

The thought was echoed by Tom Dumoulin, who had regularly called for additional testing and heightened scrutiny during his own career as a rider. “Maybe it’s a warning shot fired by the anti-doping agency. Like, ‘Guys, watch out, we have the ability to test you at night, and we could just show up at your door at 3am,’” he said on NOS. “If they find nothing now, that would be enormously positive for the credibility of cycling.”

Oliver Naesen (Decathlon CMA CGM) expressed some reservations about the effects of nighttime testing on riders’ sleep and recovery, but he still acknowledged that “doping agencies also have to test at a time when it matters” in an appearance on HLN's Wielerpodcast.

The nighttime tests come at a moment when the level of performance in pro cycling has risen to unprecedented heights. Warren Barguil (Picnic-PostNL) outlined the new reality this week in an interview with L’Équipe where he noted that he won the Col d’Izoard in 2017 with a power output of 5.9 watts/kg.

“Nowadays, you need almost a watt/kg more, it’s crazy.  People don’t realise how much the level has risen,” Barguil said. “The new generation is coming and doing 7 watts/kg for 20 minutes. Before, if you did 6 watts/kg, you were good. Now you’re a domestique.”

Various explanations have been advanced for the overall increase in performance, from breakthroughs in nutrition to improvements in bike tech, but every era of cycling has had its advances. In the 1990s, for instance, it was heart rate monitors rather than power-meters, and energy bars rather than lactate gels, but – as Vaughters pointed out – cycling wasn’t vigilant enough in policing the illegal contributions to performance that were taking place in the background. 

The debate on nighttime testing will doubtless rage on, but cycling cannot afford the same mistakes and the same complacency now.