Tour riders unhappy with sleep being interrupted for early-hours doping tests
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VOUGY, France, July 19 : Tour de France riders criticised night-time doping tests after race leader Tadej Pogacar and Dane Jonas Vingegaard were woken in the early hours of Sunday for unannounced controls ahead of the 15th stage of the race.
Vingegaard later had to abandon Sunday’s stage after breaking his collarbone in a crash, with Slovenian rival Pogacar saying “bad sleep” could have contributed to the accident.
Stage winner Remco Evenepoel said being woken in the night for testing was “inhuman” while the International Testing Agency defended the timing of the testers’ visits.
Unannounced testing has been permitted on the Tour since 2016, with riders subject to on-the-spot checks between the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. local time.
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Vingegaard, who had been second in the general classification, said before Sunday’s start in Champagnole that he had been tested at 2 a.m. (0000 GMT).
“The ITA didn’t allow me to sleep much. I was sleeping very well but somebody knocked on my door at 2 a.m., big surprise to me,” the two-time Tour winner said. “Of course, it’s good that they test but when it’s affecting performance and your sleep, I don’t think it’s so good.”
“It took me about 40 minutes before I was back in my room, so not the best night.”
“FOUR HOURS OF SLEEP”
Yellow jersey holder Pogacar had been tested at 5 a.m., a UAE Team Emirates-XRG spokesperson said.
“I got four hours of sleep today,” Pogacar said before the start. “I couldn’t fall back to sleep. It was definitely not nice to wake up in the middle of sweet dreams.
“They come randomly in the mornings through the tour, and today they chose night-time.”
Vingegaard, who had been second in the general classification, crashed some 20 km from the finish of the 183.9- km mountainous stage on the Plateau de Solaison, and would undergo surgery on a severe collarbone fracture, his Visma-Lease a Bike team said.
After the stage, in which he finished second, Pogacar spoke again about the test visits, saying of his injured rival: “I wish him all the best… maybe this was also the consequence of bad sleep.
“This year it’s been very strange with the testing in general,” he told a press conference. “They’re trying to do different things.
“I was counting how many controls I had at home since the first of January until the end of the classics. When I was home, I was waking up every day at six to go check the doorbell to see if somebody was ringing because I had so many visits,” the Slovenian said, adding that he had undergone a blood test following his Strade Bianche triumph in March.
Belgian Evenepoel said he considered the night-time tests “disrespectful” and told a press conference: “It’s something that actually we should not accept as riders. It’s quite inhuman to wake us up in the middle of the night.”
The ITA said it was “conscious that night-time testing may be disruptive to riders’ rest and recovery.”
“Due consideration has therefore been given to minimise as much as possible the impact testing activities have on riders,” the body said in a statement.
“Effective testing must, in limited and justified circumstances, be capable to occur outside standard daytime hours.”
Source: Reuters
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