Tadej Pogacar will begin his bid to regain the Tour de France on July 1 after Jonas Vingegaard swept to glory in 2022.
Pogacar wore the yellow jersey on the Champs Elysees in 2020 and 2021 and he would have joined Louison Bobet, Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx and Miguel Indurain in a select group by winning three in a row.
Lance Armstrong was once among that exclusive club before being stripped of his seven consecutive Tours de France between 1999 and 2005 for doping offences.
The Armstrong scandal continues to cast a shadow over the sport to this day and forms part of a history of once-revered champions who have been implicated by the use of performance-enhancing drugs, including Anquetil and Merckx among others.
"I'm not angry," Pogacar said amid the familiar wave of innuendo after his 2021 triumph despite having never failed a test or committed a doping violation. "They are uncomfortable questions because the history of cycling was really bad. I totally understand why there are all of these questions.
"I didn't prepare anything for those kind of questions. I just like to ride my bike and what comes with it, comes with it. I'll deal with it. I'm a good kid with a good education. I'm not one to take shortcuts."
Unfortunately for Pogacar and his contemporaries who are publicly committed to clean cycling today, such shortcuts are as old as the race itself.
Did doping used to be legal at the Tour de France?
Between its launch in 1903 until doping was criminalised under French law in 1965, there were no restrictions on substances that riders could take.
Strychnine was the strongest drug in wide circulation during the early year of the Tour, with alcohol and amphetamines also prominent. The 1923 winner Henri Pellissier gave an interview the following year to journalist Albert Londres, alongside his brother Francis Pellissier and fellow rider Maurice Ville.
"We suffer from the start to the end. You want to know how we keep going?" said Henri Pellissier, before producing what he claimed to be drugs from his bag. "That's cocaine, four our eyes. This is chloroform, for our gums."
The trio proceeded to produce boxes of pills before Francis Pellissier added: "The truth is that we keep going on dynamite." Although Francis later admitted to a few embellishments, with the riders enjoying the fact that Londres was not an expert on their sport, the 'Convicts of the Road' article entered cycling lore.
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In 1949, the year he claimed the first of his two Tour successes, Italian rider Fausto Coppi was asked by a French radio station if he took la bomba — a heady combination of amphetamines, cola and caffeine. "Yes, whenever it was necessary," he replied, before stating anyone who thought leading riders did otherwise was "not worth talking to" about cycling.
Four of Anquetil's five Tour titles came in a dominant run between 1961-1964, immediately before doping became illegal. "You'd have to be an imbecile or a hypocrite to imagine that a professional cyclist who rides 235 days a year can hold himself together without stimulants," was his blunt take. When testing came in Anquetil frequently protested against those demands on riders as a threat to their liberty.
The death of Tom Simpson at the 1967 Tour de France
A year after anti-doping tests arrived at the Tour for the first time in 1966, the race experienced arguably its most chilling drugs tragedy.
Tom Simpson, the leader of the British team, fell off his bike a kilometre from the summit of Mont Ventoux — one of the race's most celebrated and punishing climbs. Upon Simpson's insistence, his team put him back in the saddle, only for him to fall again less than half a kilometre up the road.
Three spectators helped Simpson to the ground, by which point he was unconscious with his hands still locked to his handlebars. A police helicopter took the rider to Avignon Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Simpson's post-mortem found he had taken amphetamine and alcohol. Although his official cause of death was "heart failure caused by exhaustion", authorities determined that the combination of drugs and alcohol in his system had impaired his judgement and allowed him to push his body beyond its capabilities. Two empty tubes and one half-full tube of amphetamines were found in the rear pocket of his racing jersey.
A granite memorial to Simpson stands on the spot where he collapsed on Ventoux and remains a solemn pilgrimage for cyclists and fans of the sport. Drug testing became more widespread in the aftermath of the tragedy, but this simply ramped up the now decades-long spectacle of riders attempting to stay ahead of the testers by any means necessary.
Mark Cavendish doffs helmet to Tom Simpson memorial while battling the time cut on Mont Ventoux...Cav finished 40 minutes behind stage winner Wout van Aert but seven minutes clear of the dreaded time cut and can start stage 12 tomorrow https://t.co/1o9cLc8Xhx #cycling pic.twitter.com/t3JEdSZMOV
— road.cc (@roadcc) July 7, 2021
Michel Pollentier's urine-filled condom
Merckx was one of those who fell foul at a time when the scientists fleetingly caught up with the athletes. The Belgian won his fifth Tour in 1974 and already had a couple of doping violations to his name (though he hadn't failed a test at Le Tour), although a rigorous system of punishment and suspensions was still something the sport lacked.
In 1977, a test for the amphetamine-like drug pemoline was perfected and Merckx returned a positive at La Fleche Wallone. Such events persuaded some riders they would have to get creative, none more infamously than Michel Pollentier.
A three-time stage winner at Le Tour and victor at the 1977 Giro d'Italia, Pollentier was among the favourites for glory in France in 1978 — something a triumph on Alpe d'Heuz to put him in the yellow jersey at the end of stage 16 appeared to confirm.
However, that meant a doping test for a man with amphetamines coursing through his bloodstream. It was time for Pollentier to get creative.
French rider Antoine Gutierrez was being tested alongside the Belgian national champion and the former was seen to have a small plastic tube in his hand alongside his test flask. Testers found Gutierrez was trying to dupe them with a pre-prepared sample and thought it prudent to check Pollentier.
Their examination revealed an elaborate system of tubes under the rider's shorts and jersey, connected to a condom filled with 'clean' urine. This was tucked under his armpit, with the intention to dispense the sample through the tubes by applying pressure with his arm.
Pollentier was duly ejected from the race in ignominy, leaving Bernard Hinault to win the first of his record-equalling five titles. Battles between the likes of Hinault and the United States' three-time winner Greg Le Mond meant a golden era in the 1980s, but the spectre of drugs remained.
Paul Kimmage, a former teammate and friend of 1987 winner Stephen Roche, released his incendiary booked Rough Ride after retiring in 1990, giving his own account of drug use and detailing how amphetamines, steroids and other performance-enhancing substances were widespread.
EPO, the Festina scandal and Operacion Puerto
The grim picture painted by Kimmage only became bleaker with the emergence of erythropoietin, a drug used to increase red blood cell production in anaemia sufferers. That very property also made it incredibly useful for cyclists trying to scale the Alps and Pyrenees as quickly as they could.
An initial problem for testers was finding a way to distinguish between the body's natural production of red cells, as had previously been the case when looking for the illegal use of testosterone and cortisone.
Such subtleties were something of a moot point when Willy Voet, a soigneur for the Festina team, was arrested by French customs officers prior to the 1998 Tour. Voet was in possession of several illegal drugs including EPO, growth hormones, testosterone and amphetamines, along with drug paraphernalia such as syringes.
Several raids on team hotels followed, most notably TVM, who were raided on the same day Festina left the tour. By December 2000, all nine Festina riders had confessed to EPO use.
The first EPO test was introduced the following year, although phenomena such as micro-dosing meant riders were still able to have testers on the run. It began a period when the testimonies of whistleblowers and the efforts of law enforcement became arguably more significant in the battle against doping than results returned from the testing lab.
Operacion Puerto, the still-ongoing investigation into doping in Spanish professional sports, saw Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso among a number of riders banned from the 2006 race. That was cycling's biggest scandal since Festina, bookending a seven-year period where a man who famously never failed a drugs test swept all before him.
The downfall of Lance Armstrong
"This afternoon I will be keeping my arms by my side because I'm not sure this is something we should be applauding," wrote David Walsh in the Sunday Times on the day Armstrong rode into Paris to win his first Tour in 1999.
A year on from the Festina affair, cycling's premier event had the perfect hero for renewal. Not only had Armstrong rode with daring brilliance and opened up a traditionally European sport to a freshly enraptured American audience, he'd done so after recovering from a life-threatening cancer diagnosis.
Walsh's suspicious outlook cast him as something of a pariah, but the Irish journalist remained on Armstrong's case during his seven-year Tour reign and ill-fated comeback as the layers fell away piece by piece to unveil a scandal without parallel in sporting history.
After years of strident denials and legal action, which included suing Walsh and his newspaper for libel in 2004, and damning testimonies from former teammates Frankie Andreu, Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis, Armstrong was found by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) in 2012 to have been the ringleader of "the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping program that sport has ever seen".
In October 2012, the International Cycling Union (UCI) stripped Armstrong off his seven titles and, after not opting to appeal the decision at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), the Texan took part in a televised interview with Oprah Winfrey on January 13, 2013. He confessed to using performance-enhancing drugs throughout his career, including during all seven of his Tour victories.
The years 1999-2005 remain blank in the Tour de France's records in acknowledgement of a doping problem in the sport that stretched far beyond Armstrong and his US Postal team. Of all the riders who finished second to Armstrong during his reign, only 2002 runner-up Joseba Beloki does not have a doping offence to his name — and only since he was removed from the Operacion Puerto case by Spanish officials in 2006.
Ullrich and Basso, Armstrong's main rivals of the era, were found to have doped by Puerto. Landis’ 2006 win was scrubbed from the records, with victory awarded to Oscar Pereiro in second. Pereiro failed a test for Salbutamol on that Tour but was later acquitted.
Andy Schleck was named the 2010 winner after two-time champion Alberto Contador tested positive for clenbuterol.
How has the Tour de France changed since Lance Armstrong?
No Tour winner has been stripped since Contador and the UCI, alongside the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has sought to take great strides since the Armstrong era.
Out-of-competition testing has become far more comprehensive, underpinned by the Anti-Doping Administration Management System (ADAMS) that ensures a rider's whereabouts is known when not at an event or in training.
The development of athlete biological passports, an electronic record that collates all of a rider's urine and blood tests, has been another important step. Biological passports build a haematological and steroid profile of an athlete, meaning riders showing abnormal values after a test can still be sanctioned even if there is no banned substance present on that particular occasion.
British-based Team Sky (now INEOS Grenadiers) have been the dominant force since Armstrong left the stage. Former British Cycling chief David Brailsford successfully brought his "marginal gains" philosophy from the track to the road and, after Bradley Wiggins' Tour de France win in 2012, Chris Froome chalked up four in five seasons.
However, a little shine has also come off that feel-good story. In 2018, a parliamentary inquiry by the digital, culture, media and sport select committee concluded that Wiggins had "crossed ethical lines" by obtaining therapeutic use exemptions (TUE) to use banned corticosteroid triamcinolone to treat asthma during his 2012 triumph.
Wiggins insisted he had gained no competitive advantage from the drug and said his life had been made a "living hell" by a "malicious" campaign, but concerns over the extent to which the TUE system is open to abuse remain.
In the midst of his Tour dominance, Froome tested positive for salbutamol at the 2017 Vuelta a Espana but was cleared following an investigation.
Overall, it amounts to a history that means Pogacar, Vingegaard and whoever succeeds them as cycling's top dogs will continue to field awkward but legitimate questions over the validity of the most extraordinary feats in the sport.
