Striking yellow: The two-time Tour winner Tadej Pogacar is faster than Lance Armstrong.
Foto: imago/Panoramic International
The Tour de France is getting faster and faster, and there are fewer and fewer doping offenders in cycling. This is a paradox of recent years. The speed increased steadily: Tadej Pogačar was faster in his last tour win than Lance Armstrong in six of his seven tour wins. Only in 2005 did the American still outperform the Slovenian – at 41.65 km/h compared to 41.16 km/h. But no one in the more than 100-year history of the Tour of France was faster than the two.
The picture is even more crass in the case of the monuments to the classics. This year’s editions of Paris-Roubaix and Liège-Bastogne-Liège were the fastest ever. In the other five races, the winning times were all among the ten fastest overall. In contrast to the Tour de France, which has a different course every year, classic monuments are characterized by a traditionally identical route. Speeds are therefore better comparable.
Of course, chemical substances are not the only conceivable way to increase speed. Wheels and clothing have become more aerodynamic. A whole army of nutrition experts, training scientists and data analysts optimize the energy supply in athletes’ bodies and collect new data to better convert this energy into propulsion on asphalt, gravel and cobblestones. Unfortunately, only one discipline of analysis relevant to sport delivers increasingly sparse results: the number of hits in doping tests has decreased massively.
If you look at the UCI sanctions list, only five drivers were convicted in 2021. None of them were employed by a World Tour racing team. In the pandemic year 2020 with massive reductions in doping tests, only two drivers were caught. From this season only the case of 17-year-old Uzbek Samandar Sultanov is known, after all, a starter in the junior race of the semi-classic Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne.
In 2019, however, 16 cyclists were caught cheating, the most prominent of whom was Tour de France stage winner Jarlinson Pantano. There were nine in 2018, including former Giro stage winner Kanstantsin Siutsou. So the decline is clearly visible. But the current case of 17-year-old Sultanov also illustrates that representatives of the new generation are not protected from the sins of the old.
The decline in positive doping samples correlates in time with the takeover of testing by the international testing agency Ita. Previously, the test organization CADF, which is independent of the world cycling association, was responsible for this. Since Ita has determined and carried out the logistics of the tests, there has not been a single case of doping at World Tour level and not a single positive test on a Grand Tour. Because this also makes laypeople suspicious, the World Association and Ita saw the need for a remarkable calming event this week. UCI President David Lappartient and Ita Director General Benjamin Cohen, together with other employees of their institutions, invited to a Zoom press conference.
This appointment was an exemplary exercise in the discipline of mutual backslapping. Ita-Boss Cohen attested to his institution that the takeover of the CADF experts went smoothly. Eleven of the previous 13 people have been taken on. A total of 16 full-time employees in the context of the test agency dedicated themselves to the fight against doping in cycling, emphasized Cohen. So there are more resources. And Cohen also emphasized the effect of interdisciplinary learning: »The exchange beyond the individual sports has become more intensive at Ita. The ITA organizes the test programs for more than 50 professional associations.« The sobering conclusion: everything is really good, although the results are getting worse and worse.
Ita is a big player in the anti-doping business, but without a bite. Because word of this must have gotten to the highest ranks, Nicholas Raudenski had a PowerPoint lesson ready for the world press. The head of the Ita investigative unit explained how important information about suspicious circumstances is in order to be able to carry out more targeted tests. When asked by »nd«, however, he was unable to state the extent to which his investigators received information about sports fraud in cycling and how many procedures could be developed from them.
Raudenski used to work in the anti-doping programs of the football associations Fifa and Uefa. They were characterized by maximum failure record. If he now announces that there should be targeted controls at the Tour de France and also in the run-up to the Tour de France based on the information from investigators and whistleblowers, one can assume that they should also confirm the current picture: Test yes, preferably with even more man power But please don’t find anything.
The representatives of Ita and UCI did not want to comment on the results of the doping raid at the Bahrain Victorious team hotel during the 2021 tour, citing “the ongoing investigations”. Cycling is getting faster and faster, for many reasons. However, the intensity of the search for doping is decreasing. Not a nice sign a few weeks before the start of the Tour de France in Copenhagen.
