As cycling’s season prepares for its traditional curtain raiser at Opening Weekend — the cobbled races of Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne take place this Saturday and Sunday — the usual narratives and talking points are already doing the rounds.
Will Tadej Pogačar and Mathieu van der Poel dominate the spring campaign again? Will an attempt at the Giro d’Italia-Tour de France double prove too much for Jonas Vingegaard? And how will early-season injuries to Wout Van Aert, Mads Pedersen and other key figures affect their campaigns?
There’s another common conversation among the peloton and around the bus paddocks, but one you’re unlikely to hear in public: the threat of an imminent doping scandal or a slew of doping cases.
In the last six months, the International Cycling Union (UCI) has announced doping suspensions (some provisional) for 12 riders. Most cases have involved lower-division (or track, BMX and para-cyclist) competitors. Oier Lazkano, who was riding for the heavily backed Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team, is the most notable exception.
The sense of suspicion that plagued cycling for so long has returned. On the eve of the spring classics, the atmosphere is tetchy.
According to two different sources close to the UCI, speaking anonymously to protect relationships, the sport’s governing body has been pressing the International Testing Agency (ITA) — which manages anti-doping programs for cycling and more than 70 international federations — to find a high-profile case of cheating within the sport.
Those sources explained that many at the UCI believe the absence of a big-name suspension in the past decade cannot be wholly due to the sport’s cleanliness.
According to those sources, the UCI believes that a prominent figure being sanctioned for doping would be a healthy development, proof that the anti-doping program is functioning. It would also act as a deterrent to others — if a big rider can be caught, anyone can.
“The rumours going around the peloton are extremely concerning,” Emily Brammeier, president of the voluntary anti-doping organisation Movement for Credible Cycling (MPCC), told The Athletic. “There are questions that need answering.”
Oier Lazkano has been provisionally suspended by the UCI over ‘unexplained abnormalities’ in his biological passport. (Pim Waslander / Soccrates / Getty Images)
Let’s get one thing clear: cycling has moved on significantly from its many horror chapters. Whether it was the Festina affair, Operación Puerto or Lance Armstrong committing the greatest fraud in sporting history, cycling in 2026 is incomparable to where it was even 15 years ago.
Bike racing has led the way in the development of anti-doping programs. The scandal at the 1998 Tour de France, when the entire Festina team was kicked out of the race after police uncovered large quantities of doping products in a team vehicle, prompted the creation of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
Additionally, two decades ago, cycling was the first sport to introduce an athlete biological passport (ABP) system, helping detect anomalies in blood values that could indicate the use of prohibited substances.
More recently, the ITA, which oversees testing at the Olympic Games, was launched in 2018, mostly by personnel from the Cycling Anti-Doping Foundation.
In the past few years, only athletics (and occasionally football, depending on the year) have conducted more anti-doping tests than cycling.
There are roughly 1,000 professional cyclists worldwide, and they are tested out of competition three to four times per season. Higher-profile riders, as well as those who alert suspicion, will be tested even more when at home or at training camps.
For the top riders, such as Pogačar and Vingegaard, they’re tested every day they’re leading a Grand Tour.
In the past decade, the number of positive doping cases within the sport has averaged around 20 a year, with no more than five positive cases from men’s WorldTour teams in a single season. On the face of it, cycling is, as its stakeholders allege, cleaner than ever.
But there have been noteworthy infractions.
Lance Armstrong on his way to a seventh successive Tour de France victory in 2005 — the American was later stripped of those titles in 2012. (Joel Saget / AFP via Getty Images)
Before Lazkano’s provisional suspension in October — which came about due to abnormal values in his ABP while at Movistar between 2022 and 2024 — the biggest doping case in cycling since the Covid-19 pandemic was the four-year suspension handed to ‘Superman’ Miguel Ángel López in 2023 for possession and use of menotropin during the 2022 Giro d’Italia.
López was caught up in the Operación Ílex doping ring uncovered in Spain. The doctor at the centre of it, Marcos Maynar, has not been sanctioned and has continued to deny the claims. Lopez, on the other hand, has been working in a butcher’s shop in his native Colombia.
As well as Lazkano, biological passport anomalies have led to the suspensions of two other WorldTour riders (Robert Stannard and Franck Bonnamour, who received backdated four-year bans) in the past two years.
The most bizarre recent case came from Italian rider Andrea Piccolo, who was stopped at an airport in 2024 on suspicion of transporting human growth hormone. American team EF Education-EasyPost sacked him, and he briefly opened an OnlyFans account with his influencer girlfriend. In early February 2026, he was arrested by Italian police in Naples with counterfeit money. The investigation is ongoing.
It appears, however, that these are all isolated cases, and there is certainly no indication of systematic doping among teams, as was the case with Armstrong’s U.S. Postal or Rabobank. Indeed, except for Visma-Lease a Bike’s sole positive case (Michel Hessmann for a banned diuretic in 2023, which anti-doping agencies accepted was due to contamination), none of cycling’s superteams have had a positive test in recent times.
INEOS Grenadiers has faced a string of accusations for its conduct when it was Team Sky, with a British parliamentary committee concluding in 2018 that “drugs were being used by Team Sky, within WADA rules, to enhance the performance of riders and not just to treat medical need.”
But despite reports at last summer’s Tour de France that the team’s chief carer, David Rozman, requested unspecified “stuff” from the disgraced doping doctor Mark Schmidt at the 2012 Tour — won by Team Sky’s Bradley Wiggins — INEOS/Sky has never recorded a doping positive since its inception in 2010. An adverse analytical finding for salbutamol, recorded by Chris Froome in 2017, was overturned by the UCI the following year.
Pogačar’s team, UAE Team Emirates-XRG, has a similar clean bill.
So what’s the problem? Why are people increasingly fearful all of a sudden and less trusting of what they’re seeing?
All sports and anti-doping bodies share some worries: the belief that cheaters are one step ahead of them; that micro-dosing (as well as gene doping, which WADA has coined a “threat to the integrity of sport”) has made it possible for athletes to dope in small amounts and evade detection; and that it’s possible to take banned substances without abnormal values appearing in one’s ABP.
Adjacent to that, a court ruling in Madrid in 2020 even ruled that the ABP was not a legally binding method to determine a doping offence.
Another is the reality of the restrictions and limitations placed on anti-doping bodies. In Spain, for example, where most professional cyclists reside, athletes cannot be tested between 11pm and 6am for privacy reasons — enough time for doping products to leave an athlete’s system.
What’s more, there is the perennial concern over the amount of funding awarded to anti-doping agencies. The United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) has an annual budget of $31m; and the United Kingdom and Spanish equivalents — UKAD and CELAD — have budgets of around £9m ($12.3m) and €11.2m ($13.3m).
One individual anti-doping test costs on average €1,000, and that doesn’t include the cost of sending a doping control officer to an event or an athlete’s house. The math tells you that it’s simply not possible to test every professional athlete very frequently.
Compare those figures to the annual budgets of cycling’s 18 WorldTour teams of €33m, and the biggest teams having yearly revenues north of €50m, and it’s clear that there are financial restrictions on national and international anti-doping organisations that prevent them from monitoring athletes as they would desire.
Speaking about the sporting landscape in general, one veteran anti-doping expert, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Athletic that “in a lot of countries it’s impossible to be caught”. They added: “I don’t see us going forward; I see us going backwards.”
Anti-doping budgets are stretched (Doug Pensinger / Getty Images)
Rumours have circulated in the past year that doctors previously sanctioned for doping offences were once again operating in cycling, perhaps through intermediaries to hide their involvement.
That speculation was revealed to at least be partly true this month, when Escape Collective reported that Pepe Martí, a former coach at US Postal described as “nothing more than a drug-trafficker” by ex-American rider Floyd Landis, had been working with the father of Marc Soler, a rider for UAE Team Emirates-XRG.
Jaume Soler, an amateur triathlete, was handed an 18-month suspension for his association with the still-sanctioned Martí, who is prohibited from working with amateur and professional athletes. More worrying was the CELAD document, which highlighted that “medical data of third parties” was found.
Marc Soler “passed by” when Jaume Soler and Martí were pulled over by Spanish police, according to the CELAD report, but the Team Emirates rider insisted that he has no relationship with Martí. “I don’t have anything to do with this,” he told Escape. “Neither do I have anything to hide. I haven’t done anything wrong.”
USADA rules suggest Martí ought to have his suspension — which expires in June 2027 — extended to a lifetime ban, but neither USADA, WADA nor CELAD would comment on the ban handed out to Jaume Soler, leading to speculation that they are working on a larger case against Martí.
Team UAE rider Marc Soler. His father has been handed an 18-month suspension for his association with Pepe Martí. (Miguel Riopa / AFP via Getty Images)
Soler’s UAE team, as well as Vingegaard’s Visma, have also been reproached by the UCI over the now-banned technique of carbon monoxide inhalation for performance enhancement.
Carbon monoxide rebreathing falls into the category known as ‘grey areas’, something the MPCC is increasingly troubled by. The French charity, which counts seven men’s WorldTour teams as members, also cites the apparent prevalence of ‘finisher bottles’ — drinks mixed with painkillers and other legal supplements towards the end of a race — and the supposed frequent use of decongestants that are only permitted up to a certain dose as areas of concern for athlete health.
“It is now normal for medicines used to treat the sick to be used for performance purposes. We need to take action to close the loopholes in our anti-doping system to make it more robust,” MPCC president Brammeier said.
“Quick action is needed to protect riders’ health and for our sport to remain credible. This isn’t to point to cycling negatively, but is instead a proactive and constructive approach to preserve and grow our sport. This will give riders a fair chance to perform, ultimately letting them have their moment of glory without questions and speculation.”
Another point worrying journalists is the general mood of the doping conversation. Whereas questions on doping were encouraged a decade ago, as the sport sought to cleanse its image, enquiries on the topic are much more likely to be rebuffed and snarled at. Transparency and openness have given way to secrecy.
Most riders, managers, staff, agents and political figures in the sport are declaring that cycling is an example to others, and that there’s no reason to fret over the credibility of its biggest stars and its biggest races.
One team manager, who wished to remain anonymous, even told The Athletic that it’s “just silly season” and that people are bored with the lack of races, allowing rumours and speculation to fill the void in the news cycle. “Is a rumour really credible?” they added, insisting there are no reasons to suspect that the sport is on the precipice of a major doping scandal.
But distrust within the sport has reached levels not seen for a while. That can be partly or entirely traced back to the dominance of a select few superteams, with others wanting to believe that there is some other reason beyond inflated budgets behind the gulf in performance and results.
The disquiet and animosity in the peloton is unlikely to dissipate soon — and a positive doping case involving a big rider would only accentuate that — yet for now, they are just rumours, little titbits of information being passed around between riders, staff and the media.
For cycling, probably the most scrutinised sport in the world, given its history, the ghosts of the past never truly depart.
Unfortunately, as has been shown in the case involving López and most recently Martí and Jaume Soler, there is always someone ready to let them back in the door.