Top Tour de France contenders Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard have criticised the International Testing Agency (ITA) after being abruptly awoken in the middle of the night for unannounced drug tests.
Before the 15th stage of the tour, which is a brutal 183.9km mountainous stage from Champagnole to Plateau de Solaison, Vingegaard was woken up in his hotel at 2am for an unannounced drug test.
Jonas Vingegaard talks to Slovenia’s Tadej Pogacar. Mosa’ab Elshamy
“I guess the ITA didn’t allow me to sleep very much,” Vingegaard told Eurosport.
“I was sleeping very well, and somebody knocked on my door at 2am – a big surprise to me. Of course, it’s good that they test, but when it’s affecting performance and your sleep, I don’t think that it’s so good.
“I think it took me about 40 minutes before I was back in my room, so it was not the best night, I still feel OK. I cannot change it but that’s a part of it.
“Hopefully, I’m not the only one because it has to be equal for everyone.”
A UAE Team Emirates-XRG spokesperson confirmed that yellow jersey holder Pogacar had also been tested at 5am that same morning, in a different hotel.
“I got four hours of sleep today,” Pogacar said.
“I couldn’t fall back to sleep. It was definitely not nice to wake up in the middle of sweet dreams.
“They come randomly in the mornings through the tour, and today they chose nighttime.”
Vingegaard eventually retired from the tour entirely after he fractured his collarbone in a late crash in stage 15 and will now require surgery.
Following the incident, Pogačar suggested that Vingegaard’s crash could be faulted to his “ruined sleep” caused by the erratic testing hours.
“First they wake him at 2am for a control, which I think is very inhumane and ruined his sleep,” Pogacar said to reporters.
Jonas Vingegaard seen in a sling after his stage 15 crash. @RNBWCV
“It got me thinking that it could be also like a small percentage why he crashed because he probably didn’t sleep good today.
“This year, it’s been very strange with the testing in general,” Pogacar explained further in a press conference.
“They’re trying to do different things.
“I was counting how many controls I had at home since the first of January until the end of the classics. When I was home, I was waking up every day at six to go check the doorbell to see if somebody was ringing because I had so many visits.”
Stage 15 winner Remco Evenepoel echoed the frustration, saying he considered the nighttime tests “disrespectful” to riders trying to recover after their brutal rides.
“It’s something that actually we should not accept as riders. It’s quite inhuman to wake us up in the middle of the night,” Evenepoel said.
In response to the backlash from riders, the ITA said it was “conscious that nighttime testing may be disruptive to riders’ rest and recovery.”