Tadej Pogačar’s agent and others have expressed concern about the proposed use of riders’ power and training data as an anti-doping measure, saying they believe the International Testing Agency (ITA) is overstepping the mark.
Alex Carera has represented four-time Tour de France winner Pogačar and several other professional cyclists for many years and believes the proposal – which is currently undergoing a voluntary trial involving four teams and a few dozen riders – is unnecessary and unwarranted.
“I know that a commission wants to analyse the data of Training Peaks and decide some elements. No. Why? Our sport has changed a lot. Now cycling has credibility,” he told road.cc.
“Maybe 10 or 15 years ago, no, but now we have credibility because the mentality has changed.”
Carera argues that teams, riders, and the UCI itself need to work hard every day to ensure that the sport continues along the right road. However, he doesn’t see any upside to the provision of rider data to the ITA.
“We don’t [need to] find other stupid things to create only problems, because cycling is different than 15 years ago,” the Italian said. “Maybe we needed to come back to have the credibility to show to the fans that we want more controls, 24 hours availability, and so on.
“But now the mentality has changed. We do not have this problem, the doping problem. Why do we need to create something [new]?”
However, the ITA has responded to this and other concerns communicated to it by road.cc, clarifying the parameters of the study and countering some of the claims.
It has also suggested that the now-voluntary trial could, in time, translate into a compulsory measure that all UCI teams will be required to agree to.
‘I’m really worried when it becomes mandatory’
Carera’s opposition to the ITA trial is echoed by Jens Raes, an agent with the Wasserman agency, and by former pro Adam Hansen.
Raes raised questions about GDPR, saying that while the UCI and others already have a lot of personal data about riders, he wasn’t sure if the study would comply with privacy rules.
“I think they need to check with those regulations,” he told road.cc. “If it’s allowed, okay. But I don’t see it working. I think it will be conflicting in terms of data protection rules.”
Hansen’s own concerns were in other areas. The Australian is the president of the CPA, the professional riders’ association, and he voiced his misgivings to both road.cc and to Domestique. The latter publication interviewed him recently for its podcast, while Hansen spoke in depth to road.cc on the topic.
“The CPA is not really happy about this at all,” Hansen told this website. “There are some riders who don’t mind it, they think it is okay. But I do think it is bringing things too far.
“Riders have so much responsibility at the moment. Their whole life is under WADA, they have to do their whereabouts, they have to be at a special location every day for one hour, they have to fill those details in, they have to make sure that they eat the correct diet, they have a training plan they have to follow.
“And while this is voluntary at the moment, I’m really worried when it becomes mandatory.”
Some observers of the sport may remember the scandals of the past and wonder if at least some of the resistance to the study is due to concerns about what it might uncover.
It’s the kind of ‘if you don’t look you don’t find’ approach which ultimately caught out the UCI around the time of the Festina Affair of 1998, and again in relation to Lance Armstrong.
For his part, though, Hansen is clear about the need to remove doping from the sport. He tells road.cc about the need for good anti-doping testing, saying it is important that those breaking the rules are caught.
However, he has specific concerns about what the ITA is proposing.
Prior to listing Hansen’s issues with the protocol, though, it’s important to be clear about what exactly the ITA is doing.
What does the study involve, and what is it hoping to achieve?
‘We need to be open to take steps forward’
The project was, according to the ITA, first discussed in 2015 and then returned to in 2024 “thanks to the increase of the cycling stakeholders’ contributions to the ITA to strength the fight against doping”. It was made public on 2 July 2025, as part of a press release dealing mostly with the anti-doping protocol for the Tour de France.
The ITA said then that the project was a new longitudinal performance monitoring tool “designed to act as an additional source of intelligence to guide targeted testing and advanced laboratory analysis, prioritise investigative, or refine its long-term sample storage.”
The two-year feasibility study is being run in collaboration with the University of Kent and University College London. The ITA told road.cc this week that just under 60 riders from five different teams have signed up and have consented to share their historical power data.
Discussions are ongoing with other teams and, if the trial is successful, women’s teams and non-WorldTour men’s teams could potentially be involved in the future.
So which teams are involved?
At this point in time the identity of those squads hasn’t been made official. However, in a recent road.cc podcast interview with Emily Brammeier, the president of the anti-doping group Movement for a Credible Cycling (MPCC), she appeared to hint that the Picnic PostNL team she also works with is supportive of the ITA’s project.
Brammeier has since confirmed it is indeed part of the trial.
“I think as a sport, we need to be open to take steps forward in terms of new ways that we can catch the cheaters,” she said in that podcast. “The MPCC and the ITA have a great relationship and I can only compliment the work that they do.
“I think we are all 100 per cent behind them. There are really good people there who live and breathe this mission of trying to catch the cheaters. But of course they do need more tools, they need more resources, and I think this can be one of them.”
A list of complications
Brammeier may be in favour, but what are Hansen’s concerns?
road.cc spoke to the CPA president about his reservations prior to seeking a response to them from the ITA.
“While this is voluntary at the moment, I’m really worried when it becomes mandatory,” Hansen explained.
“I always ask the question what happens if the rider refuses to upload his training? And they said, ‘well, they’d have to enforce it.’ And then, for me, it’s like, ‘okay, what happens then?’
“At first they said it’s just a test. I said, ‘okay, that’s fine. But what happens when it’s not a test? What happens when a rider does not submit his training data? What happens if his SRM or Garmin is flat? What happens if his power meter does not work? What happens if his bike doesn’t work that day? What happens if he doesn’t ride on his road bike, and he rides on his mountain bike, and this changes his whole training programme? How can you know this?
“How do you know when he’s training at 80 per cent and not 100 per cent? Because if he has a week of training at 80 per cent and then he decides the week after to train at 100 per cent because he’s following the instructions from his coach, how did they know that he was training that week at 80 per cent and that’s not 100 per cent?
“And then the week after it [appears to be] 120 per cent, where they are thinking ‘is it 20 per cent over his limit? How can he do that?’ But it’s because he’s been training easier before.”
Hansen mentioned other complicating scenarios. These include the effects on training data after doing heat acclimatisation sessions in a sauna, during altitude training, and also after gym work. He also voiced concerns about what might happen if riders were, as part of fat-burning sessions, training for several hours without eating breakfast beforehand.
The unreliability of some power meters was also cited as a possible issue. So too potential variations between the power meters used on training bikes at home versus those on race bikes.
“To me, if it’s done 100 per cent perfectly, okay, it can work. But it’s not going to be,” he said. “Riders are not going to be able to submit every single training file. If a rider has a flat Garmin during his training ride, does that mean he has to stop? Because if he doesn’t, then he’s not submitting his training, and if he’s not submitting his training, then he’s breaking the rules. And if he’s breaking the rules, he gets punished.
“I think it’s too much. And in in the discussions of all this, they said ‘we will deal with that when it comes, but let’s first do a test.’
“But for me, we have to answer these questions first before we make all this investment into the testing.”
The ITA responds to concerns
Hansen’s questions are all reasonable to ask, particularly in light of what is an unfolding situation. Riders and teams are understandably cautious about new steps such as this, although it is worth remembering that similar apprehensions were voiced prior to the introduction of EPO testing many years ago and, more recently, the biological passport.
Both of those measures have proven very important in the fight against doping.
Hansen’s reservations may well be matched by riders and teams in the peloton. In its response to road.cc, the ITA has sought to answer some of the cited concerns.
It also gave clarification about what the trial does and doesn’t involve.
“This is exactly why the feasibility study is being conducted,” it stated, when presented with Hansen’s questions. “It is important to understand what ‘normal variation’ in rider training and performance looks like, given the many factors that can’t be controlled. The focus is on changes over time, not the impact of individual training sessions.
“The key question is: amid all this noise, after initial scrutiny from the Advisory Panel, what level of performance change can be systematically detected, and how did this relate to actual race performances? The focus is on race performance for performance-monitoring purposes. Therefore, most of the issues raised, such as skipping breakfast, gym work, or trying new training methods, are not relevant, as they do not typically affect race conditions.
“If a rider’s performance changes, whether positively or negatively, we are concerned only with the outcome, the change in performance itself. It does not matter to us how the change came about, because we do not have the data to explain the underlying cause.”
The ITA is, it says, trying to establish ‘typical within- and between-season variation in performance across different intensities and durations for both training and racing.’ It wants to understand what such normal variations look like over shorter and longer periods, including year-on-year progression.
Are the individual rider’s performances plausible, or are they trending in a suspicious way? Are riders showing an unreasonable jump in level at some point during their careers which simply doesn’t correlate with their early trajectory?
As for Rae’s concerns about GDPR, the ITA insists that the project fully complies with the data protection regulations. It said that the data is pseudo-anonymised before sharing with research partners, and that partner universities will only access performance data, not riders’ identities.
It said that “stringent security measures will protect collected data (encryption, access controls, secure storage, and transmission protocols, etc.) and data is hosted solely on ITA’s tenant.”
“Furthermore, the project underwent a review by the Ethical Committee of the partner university to ensure alignment with robust ethical standards and validates research governance.”
What’s important – and what may alleviate at least some of Hansen’s concerns – is a statement that the ITA will not sanction a rider based purely on the data itself.
In that light, it is similar to the modified biological passport. That system originally sanctioned riders for what was deemed unnatural variations in the passport itself. However, following a much-publicised legal case involving the former pro Roman Kreuziger, the ITA now tends to use those unusual passport values only as a basis for targeted testing.
“If someone is flagged, the expectation is that the ITA would follow up by reviewing additional data (e.g., training calendar, whereabouts) to determine whether there is an obvious explanation, such as an altitude camp or other influencing factors,” the ITA told road.cc.
“But ultimately, this is not critical because the data is being used only to inform and refine the testing strategy. i.e. we are not labelling someone as having doped. Flagging a rider does not imply wrongdoing, and there may be entirely legitimate reasons for their performance change. In such cases, even if they are tested, they would not be expected to produce an adverse analytical finding (AAF).”
‘Every team has its secrets about training’
So, what happens next?
The trial is underway and, over time, those analysing the data will decide if they can indeed make predictions and form conclusions in relation to the gathered information.
The ITA stresses that the longitudinal profiles will be built on race performance rather than training data due to reliability.
Training data will however be of use in reviewing any suspicious profiles that present what it terms unexpected excess performance.
So, is all this enough to satisfy the concerns of Hansen and others? Time will tell, but the CPA president has accepted that the trial will continue. This is despite the efforts to resist at the UCI’s WorldTour seminar last autumn. Hansen revealed that the CPA expressed its concern there but was outvoted by the other stakeholders, meaning the test will continue.
“I highly believe it won’t be successful,” he said. “And then it will be scrapped. But we will see how it goes.”
Rider agent Carera also hopes the programme will be scrapped. Aside from saying that the sport doesn’t have a doping issue anymore – something some may consider a big leap of faith – the Italian is also worried about privacy of data.
“I heard that they want to take all Training Peaks from all riders. But why do we need to do that? In football, Barcelona can’t say to Real Madrid, ‘today we need to stay three hours on the trainer, tomorrow two hours.’ No.
“Every team has its secrets about training. Otherwise, why do I need to spend money on the technology and after that other people copy it?” he says.
“If you copy, you arrive always second. But if you copy, it is not good for investment.”
He believes teams should be involved in any discussions about this, and be listened to.
“It is important that they speak to us. Because otherwise it is casino [a mess].”
Brammeier doesn’t see it that way. She believes the concerns have been overblown and, if some are indeed valid worries, that they will be ironed out.
“What is important to highlight is that nobody will ever have an anti-doping violation because something has gone wrong with their power file. It is used to target the testing. It is a tool to target the tests which are already in place,” she says.
This would, she feels, streamline the work the ITA does.
“They can do a better job when they have something like that. I think there are a lot of issues which do need to be overcome. But certainly my team are always open to this, and the MPCC is always open to this.
“I think in general everybody is, but there are obviously concerns. Quite rightly so, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a negative.
“I think it [the trial] can only be a good thing, in the MPCC’s opinion.”
