pogacar, vingegaard (as long as there was) and the other protagonists of the Great Loop woken up at 2am or 5am by independent inspectors with the green light of the ordinary judiciary to fight poachers always on the run from gamekeepers who in modern times fix their blood with “fleeting” microdoses of EP0 and GH (growth hormone). It's the price that cycling pays for the gigantic deceptions of the previous thirty years.
I don't usually post much here. But I'm about to drop this bombshell: 2 a.m. testing is one of the most effective ways to prevent microdosing of peptides (EPO, HGH) and testosterone. If the UCI had tested at 2 a.m. in 2001, it would have suspended us all and saved the sport 25 years of drama.
It's a shame that Tadej and Jonas have to pay for the barbarities we committed. However, I'd rather lose some sleep than gain some credibility. Honestly, I should apologize to both of them."
Let's start with this sentence by Jonathan Vaughters, former lieutenant of Lance Armstrong and now Team Principal by profession, as those who were once sporting directors who have evolved into Team Managers and now, precisely, TPs, call themselves.
Gregario, DS, then TM, and then TP. Vaughters was sidelined from professional cycling for a long time before coming to the fore as a shrewd manager, supported by Washington politics: read John Kerry, often a follower of the Tour de France and a staunch supporter of the teams managed by his friend Jonathan.
An imitator of Henry Kissinger and predecessor, among others, of Marco Rubio, who seems destined – so it is rumored – to ensure a less gossiped-about and less bellicose post-Trump era, our dear Kerry supports Vaughters as a firsthand witness to thirty years of top-level cycling, which since the 1990s has fluctuated in popular approval ratings because it has been tainted by one unfortunate little word: doping.
And if Vaughters goes so far as to say that if the UCI had tested for microdoses of peptides (synthetic erythropoietin and growth hormone) in the blood of athletes of all disciplines, at the dawn of 2026 we certainly wouldn't be in the position of wondering whether or not it's right for doping controllers to ask contemporary Tour de France heroes for blood and urine at 2 a.m. or 5 a.m.
Tour commentators on television, generally former pros of cycling and shortcuts, are careful not to mention that inspectors not affiliated with the International Cycling Union have the travel permit for nighttime visits to certain riders against whom the establishment has well-founded suspicions of cheating. The travel permit is signed by none other than a public prosecutor.
And let's say it once and for all, right? Instead of pontificating about how much and what kind of disruption is being caused to Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard, Matej Mohoric, and so on. The entire group is subjected to checks before the start of the Tour and during the final rest day—strictly before 23 p.m. and after 6 a.m.—which heralds the most demanding week of the Grande Boucle.
And then there are the checks for those competing in the most recent stage and those drawn daily as the race approaches its finish line. These have now become routine checks. The nighttime inspections and the bike frames being scanned by radar to detect any mopeds mounted on the bike are not "normal" appointments, but rather "special" ones, criticized even by those who have brought cycling to the brink of the abyss of its reputation, which now negatively discriminates against those intending to approach the Tour and all the other races, making them pay the high price of alienation from event organizers and Team Principals, who want to build top-tier teams.
The UCI and the National Federations' great fault lies in having allowed the "foxes" who rigged the game in the past to guard the chicken coop, leading cycling to the most obvious accusation of lack of credibility. One thinks of certain managers, technicians, team principals, and riders with records full of asterisks underlining their sporting offenses. And now they pontificate, command, direct, etc.: they have sent cycling to the bottom of the cliff and now they cry foul if it takes nocturnal visits to uncover the tricks they themselves first deployed.
Without a good reputation and sustainable credibility, any sport is doomed to fail. Cycling is burdened by a quarter-century of incursions granted to the poachers of sports medicine. It's sad to see that the same perpetrators of these crimes continue to flee from game wardens and occupy prominent positions, siding with the most complaining people who struggle to understand that the spotlight must be shone on the years and places still in darkness.
Why put a microphone under the lips of former poachers still at the top of the maligned cycling scene? Shall we list them? Better not, because the entire web wouldn't have enough space, and certainly not for fear of some reckless denunciation.
Tadej Pogacar, Remco Evenepoel, and Jonas Vingegaard (while he was still in the race before being cut from the Tour due to a crash) lived up to the expectations for 2026, built on remote performances or improved preparation for the three-week test. They barely raised their voices against the "vampires" who occasionally showed up at their hotel rooms or who awaited them at the day's finish lines. They know full well that their credibility cannot be left in the hands of the most foolish. Nor did they respond to the provocations of Lance Armstrong and Bjarne Riis, who saw seven Tour victories stripped away for having made all sorts of blunders, or were dubbed Mister 69 because their blood's percentage of corpuscular matter (the red blood cells that carry oxygen to the muscles) was well above the 50% conventionally considered the dividing line between good and evil.
The sirens of foolishness continue to sing, casting a shadow over the movement they helped ruin, thus creating a widespread negative sentiment toward an endurance sport that has fallen into the fundamental errors of trying to imitate certain exponents of track and field, football, weightlifting, swimming, soccer, and so on. In light of this, the much-vaunted comparison with Messi, Yamal, Sinner, Alcaraz, and company, who continue to sleep soundly, is also undermined.
Let the "vampires" roam the streets at night. At best, those "controlled" can complain about the misdeeds perpetrated in the past by their putative fathers. Those fathers, in turn, should simply look at themselves in the mirror and repeat the famous proverb, "He who causes his own misfortune, let him cry over himself."
