How Tour de France winner Tadej Pogačar can show he is 'clean' - Town Square #17
The manager of a UCI World Tour cycling team has called on Tadej Pogačar to provide more 'guarantees' about his dominant performances. Here are eight ways in which the Slovenian star could do so.
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“Let him give guarantees. Some have. We live with suspicion,” said the Team TotalEnergies general manager Jean-René Bernaudeau of the three-time Tour de France winner Tadej Pogačar.
Three years before the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) exposed systematic doping on the US Postal Cycling team, Lance Armstrong agreed to subject himself to additional drug testing for his retirement comeback at the 2009 Tour de France.
In January of that year, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) had introduced the Athlete Biological Passport tool which is used to detect abnormalities in an athlete’s blood values caused by blood doping. Until that point, authorities had been limited to traditional doping controls which were unable to detect the use of blood transfusions, unless donor blood was used.
Throughout the course of the three-week event, Armstrong agreed to post his blood values online which were duly analysed by the Danish anti-doping expert Rasmus Damsgaard, who was commissioned by his now disgraced team boss Johan Bruyneel.
However, Armstrong soon put an end to this act of transparency when he was suspected of having undergone blood transfusions during two rest days of the Tour, according to two experts at the same Danish hospital as Damsgaard.
“We took them down after that because we had put them up all year long in the vein of complete transparency, and to be attacked like that and accused of something is complete nonsense. It's not worth it. The testing we do through the international agencies and domestic agencies is going to have to be enough for the future,” said Armstrong.
When a cyclist competes in the Tour de France, the oxygen carrying capacity of their blood slowly depletes as they ride to exhaustion over the course of 21 racing days. But for Armstrong his blood values had increased during the event, unnaturally experts believed.
“It could be that he received some blood transfusions,” said the expert Jakob Mørkeberg. “But the picture is inconsistent with what we normally see. Armstrong's levels are unchanged from the first to the last test, and normally we expect a decrease. We saw this fall in his levels during the Giro d'Italia a couple of months earlier, but not during the Tour.”
USADA claimed there was a ‘1 in a million’ chance the Texan had competed clean that year.
For Armstrong, who still maintains he rode the Tour ‘clean’ in 2009, this act of transparency ultimately backfired, but the premise of the move evidently served its purpose.
There are now calls on the three-time Tour de France winner Tadej Pogačar to do the same to show the sport has left its past behind.
In an interview with RMC Sport, the manager of the French TotalEnergies team, Jean-René Bernaudeau, has called on the rider to do more to dampen suspicions around his dominant performances, in a sport where doping is engrained.
Last month, the doctor of the two-time Grand Tour winner Nairo Quintana was served a suspended prison sentence for the possession and administration of doping substances during the 2020 Tour de France, which was won by Pogačar.
“We live with suspicion, we went through the Festina affair. I don't think cycling can afford to fall into another scandal. The sport is just trying to keep its head above water,” said Bernaudeau.
To quote the 2012 Tour de France winner Sir Bradley Wiggins, “What Pogačar is doing now, whoever is winning the Tour de France, will always have to face those questions.”
Pogačar is victim of the history of his sport, and unlike with Armstrong in 2009 there is no evidence he has ever taken performance-enhancing drugs. His performances have also been deemed credible by former Tour de France legends Greg LeMonde and Bernard Hinault.
However, as the face of cycling’s new era Pogačar could choose to proactively dampen suspicions.
“There is no confidence, and we can do nothing about it,” said Pogačar last year.
Here are eight ways in which the Slovenian cyclist could choose do ‘something’ to demonstrate he is ‘clean’.
