{"id":815712,"date":"2026-07-21T05:36:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T05:36:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/815712\/"},"modified":"2026-07-21T05:36:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T05:36:10","slug":"tour-de-france-team-boss-jonathan-vaughters-says-night-testing-could-have-stopped-cyclings-blood-doping-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/815712\/","title":{"rendered":"Tour de France team boss Jonathan Vaughters says night testing could have stopped cycling’s blood-doping era"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 \u200bcould have exposed cycling’s blood-doping era decades earlier had they existed at the time.<\/p>\n

Riders including race leader Tadej Poga\u010dar and Jonas Vingegaard were woken in the early hours of Sunday for unannounced doping checks ahead of \u200bthe 15th stage, prompting \u200ccomplaints that the disruption to sleep was unfair and potentially dangerous.<\/p>\n

Vaughters, who rode professionally through the late 1990s and early 2000s, defended the practice.<\/p>\n

“2am testing is one of the very effective ways \u200cto prevent peptide (EPO, hGH) and testosterone micro dosing,” Vaughters wrote on social media.<\/p>\n

“If \u2060UCI [Union Cycliste Inter]ationale) had tested us in 2001 at 2am? We’d all have \u200cbeen suspended and saved the sport \u200b25 years of drama.”<\/p>\n

His comments \u200ccarry particular weight given his own history with doping.<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/p>\n

Jonathan Vaughters (right) was teammates with Lance Armstrong (left) on the US Postal team. (Getty Images: Graham Watson)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

When Lance met Oprah<\/a><\/p>\n

Lance Armstrong had successfully doped for years. But when the evidence backed him into a corner, he took control of the narrative and confessed live on Oprah’s couch, martyring himself to cycling’s EPO era.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He subsequently testified in the US Anti-Doping Agency’s (USADA) investigation into \u200bArmstrong, \u200cwho 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.<\/p>\n

Vaughters \u2060went on to found the team now \u200cknown as Cannondale-EF, positioning it as \u200can advocate for clean racing.<\/p>\n

His remarks come as riders pushed back on the timing of \u200cSunday’s tests.<\/p>\n

ABC Sport Daily podcast<\/a><\/p>\n

ABC Sport Daily is your daily sports conversation. We dive into the biggest story of the day and get you up to speed with everything else that’s making headlines.<\/p>\n

Vingegaard, tested at 2 am, said the visit cost him about 40 minutes of sleep before a mountain stage on which he later \u200ccrashed \u200band broke his collarbone.<\/p>\n

Poga\u010dar, \u2060tested at 5 am, 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 controls for the UCI, said it was “conscious that night-time testing may be disruptive \u2060to riders’ rest and recovery” but that effective testing must, “in limited and justified circumstances,” occur outside daytime hours.<\/p>\n

Micro-dosing of substances \u200csuch as EPO \u200cand human growth hormone, which can clear the body within \u200bhours, has long concerned anti-doping authorities, who say predictable daytime-only testing makes such practices easier to evade.<\/p>\n

Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former professional cyclist and Cannondale-EF team boss Jonathan Vaughters has weighed in on the row over pre-dawn doping…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":815713,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[445],"tags":[49,48,635,37490,46733,286046,457,82,7082,636],"class_list":["post-815712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cycling","tag-doping","tag-jonathan-vaughters","tag-night-controls","tag-sport","tag-sports","tag-testing","tag-tour-de-france"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815712","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=815712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815712\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/815713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=815712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=815712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=815712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}