Former professional cyclist and Cannondale-EF team boss Jonathan Vaughters has weighed in on the row over pre-dawn doping tests at the Tour de France, arguing such controls could have exposed cycling’s blood-doping era decades earlier had they existed at the time.
Riders including race leader Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard were woken in the early hours of Sunday for unannounced doping checks ahead of the 15th stage, prompting complaints that the disruption to sleep was unfair and potentially dangerous.
Vaughters, who rode professionally through the late 1990s and early 2000s, defended the practice.
“2am testing is one of the very effective ways to prevent peptide (EPO, hGH) and testosterone micro dosing,” Vaughters wrote on social media.
“If UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale) had tested us in 2001 at 2am? We’d all have been suspended and saved the sport 25 years of drama.”
His comments carry particular weight given his own history with doping.
Jonathan Vaughters (right) was teammates with Lance Armstrong (left) on the US Postal team. (Getty Images: Graham Watson)
Vaughters was a teammate of Lance Armstrong on the US Postal Service team and later admitted using performance-enhancing drugs, including EPO, during his career.
He subsequently testified in the US Anti-Doping Agency’s (USADA) investigation into Armstrong, who was stripped of his seven Tour titles in 2012 after the agency concluded he ran what it called the most sophisticated doping program the sport had seen.
Vaughters went on to found the team now known as Cannondale-EF, positioning it as an advocate for clean racing.
His remarks come as riders pushed back on the timing of Sunday’s tests.
Vingegaard, tested at 2 am, said the visit cost him about 40 minutes of sleep before a mountain stage on which he later crashed and broke his collarbone.
Pogačar, tested at 5 am, said he managed only four hours of sleep. Stage winner Remco Evenepoel called the practice “inhuman”.
The International Testing Agency, which oversees doping controls for the UCI, said it was “conscious that night-time testing may be disruptive to riders’ rest and recovery” but that effective testing must, “in limited and justified circumstances,” occur outside daytime hours.
Micro-dosing of substances such as EPO and human growth hormone, which can clear the body within hours, has long concerned anti-doping authorities, who say predictable daytime-only testing makes such practices easier to evade.
Reuters
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