The knives are out, or at least unsheathed, for Jonas Vingegaard at the Tour de France, but then it doesn’t take much to trigger scepticism towards the wearer of the yellow jersey. It is always there, simmering away, even though 25 years have passed since the Festina affair of 1998 and more than a decade since Lance Armstrong confessed his doping sins to Oprah Winfrey.
Vingegaard, like so many before him, is having to recite the same mantra: trust me, I work hard, I sacrifice so much. Believe me, I am not taking anything.
Entering Thursday’s stage with a 7min 35sec lead over Tadej Pogacar and a 10:45 margin to third-placed Adam Yates, the Dane may well win this Tour by 10 minutes, which would be the biggest margin of victory since Jan Ullrich won by more than nine minutes in 1997.
It doesn’t help that the modern history of the Tour, from Lance to Landis, from Wiggins to Froome, is shrouded in a white noise of scepticism and suspicion, which ebbs and flows according to the nature of performances. That is the unavoidable context, despite all the talk of a new generation. Yet some of the questioning of Vingegaard has been based not only on his results, but also on his taciturn nature and his undeniable Danishness.
On Wednesday, after he pulverised Pogacar on the merciless slopes of the Col de la Loze, the questions came again. “I can tell, from my heart, that I don’t take anything,” he said. “I don’t take anything that I wouldn’t give to my daughter and I would definitely not give her any drugs.”
His Jumbo-Visma team manager, Grischa Niermann, defended his rider. “I’m not Jonas,” the German former professional said, “but I think he’s said a hundred thousand times that there is no performance-enhancing stuff, which is not allowed, and I’m 100% putting my fingers in the fire for that.”
A degree of scepticism towards Vingegaard became open derision in some French media outlets after he flamed the opposition in Tuesday’s time-trial stage from Passy to Combloux. “From another planet,” headlined L’Équipe while Aujourd’hui asked: “How did he do it?” It was an extraordinary performance, magnified for some, by Pogacar’s decline. A winning margin of 30 seconds would perhaps not have been so remarked upon, but inflicting a defeat of 1:38 in 22.4km on the Slovenian stretched credulity for some commentators.
However, the ailing Pogacar was already slipping out of contention, as the following day’s collapse on the brutal stage to Courchevel showed. Vingegaard had done enough earlier in the race,by containing his rival. Now, with Pogacar out of steam, he could press home his advantage.
It is not just trust in the riders that is so fragile, but also trust in the sport’s administration. Fraud in cycling has long been a characteristic. In the earliest years of the Tour, riders took lifts, skipped sections of the course and even caught trains.
As well as the threat of doping, cycling’s governing body, the UCI, now regularly scan the peloton’s bikes for concealed motors. Machines are X-rayed every day, including the race leader, stage winner, other classification leaders and some selected at random.
The use of motors, surely the darkest of the dark arts, has long been suspected. Femke Van den Driessche was suspended for six years after being caught using one in the 2016 Cyclo-cross World Championships. No one has been caught using them in Europe’s Grand Tours.
“We have a very solid and robust testing programme for both anti-doping and technological fraud and there is no reason to have doubts,” the UCI president, David Lappartient, said in 2016. “However, zero risk doesn’t exist.”
Vingegaard’s vagueness about his power outputs after Tuesday’s time trial and the reluctance of his team to open up his power files have also raised questions of malpractice. But other teams adopt the same policy for fear of leaking too much knowledge to their rivals. And it is obvious that athlete development has continued, sports science has moved at high speed, equipment is hugely enhanced, insight and understanding of performance and nutrition is now fine-tuned to the rigours of the Tour. Scrutiny and vigilance of the sport has also ramped up, albeit not especially rapidly.
All of that is just a smokescreen, argue the sceptics. Look at the range of performances, the history of the sport, the development of new doping practices. Some people have short memories, they say. Unfortunately for Vingegaard, many Tour watchers also have long ones.
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