Why Anti-Doping Officers Woke Tour de France Riders at 2am
Overnight doping tests have been legal for over a decade. The 2026 Tour was the first time furious riders experienced them. The Sports and Crime Briefing looks into why they expose microdosing.
Jonas Vingegaard was asleep when anti-doping officers knocked on his hotel-room door around 2am on 19 July.
The Dane was second in the Tour de France, behind Tadej Pogačar, with the peloton due to start the mountainous 15th stage later that morning. Vingegaard was required to provide a sample, a process he said took approximately 40 minutes. Three hours later, officers visited Pogačar and tested him at 5am.
The yellow jersey later said he had managed around four hours’ sleep before abandoning any attempt to return to bed, listening to Eminem and drinking coffee instead.
The tests were conducted by the International Testing Agency, which has managed the UCI’s anti-doping programme independently since 2021. The ITA can collect blood or urine from riders during and outside competition, monitor their Athlete Biological Passports and use information from laboratories, performance data and its own investigations to decide who should be tested and when.
There appears to be almost no precedent for such night-time doping tests. r A source familiar with testing told Cyclingnews that night-time controls had been used only once previously in professional cycling, but the report did not identify when this happened.
No such controls were conducted during the 2025 Tour, and Pogačar, Vingegaard and several experienced team managers said they had never encountered them.
That absence is not conclusive. The ITA publicly discloses a control only when it produces an apparent anti-doping violation, while selected Tour samples can be stored for ten years and tested again as detection methods improve.
However, after the Tour, UCI president David Lappartient said he fully supported night-time controls in “exceptional cases” while insisting they should not become routine. He also said the absence of any announcement of a positive test led him to believe that the Tour had been clean.
The principal purpose of night-time testing is to reduce the opportunity for microdosing: taking small quantities of a prohibited substance late at night in the hope that little or none would remain directly detectable by morning, but allowing its effects to compound over time.
What was the reaction?
The peloton was furious. Vingegaard said before the stage that he supported testing but not when it affected a rider’s sleep and performance.
Vingegaard crashed the very next day and abandoned the Tour with a broken collarbone. Pogačar suggested that the disruption to his rival’s sleep might have contributed to the accident, although there is no evidence establishing such a connection and Vingegaard’s team did not attribute the crash to the test.
Remco Evenepoel, who won the stage, accused the ITA of showing a lack of respect for the riders’ recovery. He called the practice “inhuman” and said the Cyclistes Professionnels Associés (CPA), the international riders’ union, should intervene. Vingegaard’s teammate Matteo Jorgenson said separately that the timing demonstrated “a complete lack of respect for the riders”.
The CPA’s statement did not demand that night-time controls be abolished, but questioned whether interrupting riders’ sleep during the Tour was proportionate or effective.
“The quality of sleep and recovery is essential not only for performance but also for the health and safety of the riders,” the union said. It argued that the practice impaired recovery during the most physically demanding race on the calendar and “runs counter to the intended objectives”.
The UCI responded that night-time tests could disrupt recovery but described them as exceptional measures reserved for “limited and justified circumstances”. It said the controls served an overriding interest in combating doping and gave its full support to the ITA’s use of the powers available to it.
The ITA also defended its decision, saying it had considered the effect on the riders’ rest but argued that an effective anti-doping programme demanded this in exceptional and justified cases.
The ITA did not identify microdosing as the reason for these particular controls. But its director general, Benjamin Cohen, had said in April that information available to the agency suggested there was an issue with microdosing. He supported carefully targeted night tests where the ITA possessed “very concrete suspicions”, while rejecting the idea of waking an entire peloton at 3am.
So why was night-time doping testing introduced this year?
The ITA could not, however, simply decide to knock on a hotel-room door at 2am. Under the WADA standard, controls generally take place between 6am and 11pm. Tests during the remaining overnight hours are reserved for exceptional circumstances. The UCI rules state that, without the rider’s consent or a nominated overnight slot, a control between 11pm and 6am requires a “serious and specific suspicion” of doping.
It petitioned a Paris judge for permission to collect samples from Pogačar and Vingegaard during the night of 18–19 July.
The Paris prosecutor’s office told AFP that the ITA had asked the judge “to authorise the anti-doping tests that took place overnight between July 18 and 19”. It also explained that the liberties and detention judges with jurisdiction over doping cases were empowered to rule on applications for night-time controls.
The application was reportedly made ahead of the Tour. The Paris prosecutor’s office said preparations normally involve contact between the ITA and UCI and the specialist public-health divisions of the Paris and Marseille judicial courts.
The order authorizing the tests has not been published. Neither the court, the Paris prosecutor’s office nor the ITA has disclosed what information was placed before the judge. It is therefore not known whether the application relied on an Athlete Biological Passport anomaly, a change in performance, laboratory information, a tip-off or evidence gathered through an investigation.
Nor has the ITA explained why Pogačar and Vingegaard were selected. They occupied the first two positions in the Tour, while the yellow jersey was already subject to routine testing. Those circumstances explain why they would attract close attention but not why the ITA concluded that their samples had to be collected during the protected overnight period.
The French requirement that officers demonstrate a risk of evidence disappearing is particularly relevant to microdosing. Some prohibited substances become more difficult to identify as the body processes a small dose, giving anti-doping authorities a reason to collect a sample immediately rather than wait for the normal testing window to reopen. Whether that was the evidence presented against Pogačar or Vingegaard remains undisclosed.
Why is microdosing such a concern in cycling?
The clearest account comes from the US Postal Service era. In its case against Lance Armstrong, USADA’s investigation described how riders adapted after a direct test for recombinant EPO became available in 2000. According to sworn testimony from Armstrong’s former teammates, Michele Ferrari instructed riders to take smaller doses and inject EPO intravenously rather than under the skin, allowing it to pass through the body more quickly.
USADA found that riders took EPO during the evening knowing that testers “rarely if ever” arrived during the night. If they could avoid a control for approximately 12 hours, they expected to test negative the following morning.
Testosterone was used in much the same way. Riders described wearing low-dose patches at night or placing a testosterone mixture under the tongue. Tom Danielson testified that he had been told to take the mixture before bed because it would no longer produce a positive test by morning.
Jonathan Vaughters, who admitted using EPO during his own career and later testified in the Armstrong case, connected that history directly to the 2026 Tour controls. “If UCI had tested us in 2001 at 2am,” he told Reuters when commenting on this year’s tests., “we’d all have been suspended.”
The UCI’s Cycling Independent Reform Commission found that, between 2001 and 2007, riders and doping doctors responded to improved EPO testing by reducing doses, administering them more frequently and switching from injections under the skin to intravenous use.
And the strategy persisted after the UCI introduced the Athlete Biological Passport in 2008. The passport made large doses of EPO and full blood-bag transfusions more dangerous because sudden changes in haemoglobin and other markers could be compared with the rider’s individual history. Riders therefore sought smaller interventions that would keep those markers within their expected range.
One rider told the commission that doping doctors had reduced blood transfusions from bags of around 500 millilitres to transfusions of 150–200 millilitres. Other witnesses said riders remained confident that they could take small quantities of EPO during the evening and be clear before officers were
Detection has since improved. A later study using more sensitive methods identified experimental EPO microdoses in blood and urine between 24 and 72 hours after administration. There is consequently no universal point at which an EPO microdose becomes undetectable. The window depends on the preparation, dose, method of administration, sample type and laboratory technique.
A night-time control adds another element: unpredictability. Its value does not depend on every microdose becoming invisible at 6am. Collecting blood or urine closer to the possible moment of administration increases the opportunity for direct detection and prevents riders from treating the normal overnight restriction as a guaranteed safe period.