July 20 (Reuters) – Former professional cyclist and \u2060Cannondale-EF team boss Jonathan Vaughters weighed in on the row over pre-dawn doping \u2060tests at the Tour de France, arguing such controls could have exposed cycling’s \u200cblood-doping era decades earlier had they existed at the time.<\/p>\n
Riders including race leader Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard were woken in the early hours of Sunday for unannounced doping checks ahead of the 15th stage, prompting complaints that the \u200bdisruption to sleep was unfair and potentially dangerous.<\/p>\n
Vaughters, who \u2060rode professionally through the late 1990s and \u2060early 2000s, defended the practice.<\/p>\n
“2am testing is one of the very effective ways to prevent \u2060peptide (EPO, \u200chGH) and testosterone micro dosing,” Vaughters wrote on social media.<\/p>\n
“If UCI had tested us in 2001 at 2am? We’d all have been suspended and saved the sport 25 \u2060years of drama.”<\/p>\n
His comments carry particular weight given his own history \u200bwith doping.<\/p>\n
Vaughters was a \u200cteammate of Lance Armstrong on the U.S. Postal Service team and later admitted using \u2060performance-enhancing drugs, including \u200bEPO, during his career.<\/p>\n
He subsequently testified in the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s investigation into Armstrong, who was stripped of his seven Tour titles in 2012 after USADA concluded he ran what it called the most sophisticated \u2060doping program the sport had seen.<\/p>\n
Vaughters went on to \u200bfound the team now known as Cannondale-EF, positioning it as an advocate for clean racing.<\/p>\n
His remarks come as riders pushed back on the timing of Sunday’s tests.<\/p>\n
Vingegaard, tested at 2 a.m., said the \u2060visit cost him roughly 40 minutes of sleep before a mountain stage on which he later crashed and broke his collarbone. Pogacar, tested at 5 a.m., said he managed only four hours of sleep. Stage winner Remco Evenepoel called the practice “inhuman.”<\/p>\n
The International Testing Agency, which oversees doping \u200bcontrols for the UCI, said it was “conscious that night-time testing \u2060may be disruptive to riders’ rest and recovery” but that effective testing must, “in limited and justified circumstances,” \u200boccur outside daytime hours.<\/p>\n
Micro-dosing of substances such as EPO \u200cand human growth hormone, which can clear the body \u200bwithin hours, has long concerned anti-doping authorities, who say predictable daytime-only testing makes such practices easier to evade.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Angelica Medina in Guadalajara; Editing by Stephen Coates)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"July 20 (Reuters) – Former professional cyclist and \u2060Cannondale-EF team boss Jonathan Vaughters weighed in on the row…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":815530,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[445],"tags":[49,48,635,71209,82],"class_list":["post-815529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cycling","tag-na","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=815529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815529\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/815530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=815529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=815529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=815529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}