“It’s unfortunate Tadej and Jonas have to atone for the sh*t we did”: EF boss Jonathan Vaughters says 2am Tour de France drugs tests during Armstrong era would have “saved the sport 25 years of drama”; Tour TT behind the scenes + more on the live blog

I have a feeling we might be hearing about Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard’s Sunday morning drug test wake-up calls for a while to come yet.

Yesterday saw a series of new developments to the Tour de France’s latest doping-related controversy, including the revelation that a judge in Paris signed off on the tests prior to the race, after determining that there was enough suspicion to warrant an out-of-hours knock on the door for the Tour’s then-top two.

In a curious intervention, the CPA riders’ union chose to criticise the nocturnal tests, calling on the UCI to “invest more in scientific research and detection technologies, rather than increasing the number of particularly intrusive unannounced tests”.

> Judge signed off on Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard’s nighttime doping tests due to “serious suspicions” before Tour de France, according to reports

Meanwhile, there have been mixed messages concerning how common nighttime tests are at the Tour. One source within a team informed me that their riders have been subject to controls between 11pm and 6am over the past two weeks, while a member of another team told me their doctors can never remember any of the riders ever being asked to take a nocturnal drugs test at any race.

And now, EF Education-EasyPost manager Jonathan Vaughters has chipped in, arguing that nighttime testing could have saved professional cycling a lot of grief a quarter of a century ago, while apologising to the sport’s modern stars who he claims are still “atoning” for his generation’s sins.

Vaughters, a former US Postal rider who once held the climbing record for Mont Ventoux, admitted doping throughout his career. In the late 2000s, he set up the Slipstream squad (now EF), heralding the American team as a bastion of ethics and clean sport.

“I don’t post here much,” Vaughters wrote on Twitter last night. “But I’ll roll this grenade down the aisle: 2am testing is one of the very effective ways to prevent peptide (EPO, hGH) and testosterone micro dosing.

“If the UCI had tested us in 2001 at 2am? We’d all have been suspended and saved the sport 25 years of drama.

“It’s unfortunate that Tadej and Jonas have to atone for the sh*t we did. However, I’d take some lost sleep for some gained credibility. I should apologise to both of them, honestly.”

> “Cycling is fundamentally a green sport”: EF boss Jonathan Vaughters calls on teams to “take responsibility” as Tour de France on red alert due to extreme heat

Interestingly, Vaughters’ post has acted as something of a Rorschach test for cycling fans’ opinions on doping.

While some were up in arms at his ‘apology’ to the Tour’s big two, others were fuming that the EF boss defended the nocturnal testing, telling him that he should test his own team at 2am if he’s such a fan of out-of-hours controls.

Which says it all, really.

At the start, I spotted Luke Durbridge rocking the latest warm-up marginal gain: the earphone in the nose strategy:

 

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Or maybe he’s simply aiming for perfect surround sound…

Sorry for the delay, if you’re wondering where we’ve been this morning, the answer is out on today’s TT course…

 

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A relatively long but straightforward climb kicks things off. But at the top of the hill things get technical through the village before a rapid, twisty descent. A long false flat downhill section then leads into another technical descent and run-in to the finish on tight roads with lots of pinch points and sharp corners. The riders will need their wits about them…

And here’s the descent…

 

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Incidentally, Josh Tarling is currently in the hotseat having beaten teammate Filippo Ganna by 5 seconds. However, with that long, steady climb the expectation is it will be a stage for the more GC focused specialists against the clock…

Apologies once again for the delays to today’s live blog coverage, a result of the lack of signal among the team buses at the start.

It also wasn’t helped by the fact I suffered my own fall, tripping on the legs of a race barrier (like an idiot, or Abdoujaparov) and hitting the road hard, knee first, in front of a large crowd of spectators. The bag of Haribo I was holding in my hand thankfully survived unscathed, unlike my dignity.

My knee was still bleeding pretty badly by the time we reached the press room, so I paid a visit to the Tour’s medical truck (Jonas Vingegaard wasn’t there, surprisingly), where I was patched up and deemed fit enough to return to live blog action.

Let’s hope the long-term effects of my injuries aren’t so bad and I can still make it to Paris…

Quite a lot of work went into this rather bizarre, sometimes infuriating story, so go on, give it a read while you’re having your mid-morning coffee:

> Police seize and destroy delivery cyclist’s legal e-bike hired through council-funded scheme after “bogus” test – but officers claim rider didn’t have insurance