Suspicious Minds? Not If You Keep Digging For Answers

I was a bit taken aback Tuesday after Jonas Vingegaard extended his slim lead from 10 seconds over Tadej Pogačar to a healthy 1.48 in a time trial performance that will go down in race lore. It didn’t take long for the tone of the race to shift from “what a great duel we have!” to… well, not many people were willing to label the Dane an outright cheater, but they were sure trying to hint at it.

This is the worst of it, given that L’Equipe is the journalistic culture-setter at the Tour, and IIRC they may have won some plaudits (belatedly) for putting Lance Armstrong on the hot seat immediately after his seventh Tour win in 2005 with its first serious doping exposé regarding the Texan. It’s old hat that in cycling “extraterrestrial” is a dogwhistle word for doper. Saying Vingegaard is “from another planet” is not cheeky — it’s an outright accusation.

Another person from that era decided to fan the flames a bit:

I’ll give Kimmage credit — he worked the hardest and suffered the most among journalists for his efforts to blow the whistle on the ugly Armstrong Era. He also has held back a bit, only retweeting this and a story from a Ouest-France reporter named Gaspard Bremond who posted a story in his regional paper full of disbelieving quotes from riders aghast at how much they lost to Vingegaard by.

The article itself, written with some fair caveats, contains several quotes from anonymous riders expressing their suspicions that Vingegaard’s performance can’t be explained by acceptable advantages. That’s their opinion, at least. But it’s put forth as “insiders say!” Only… is this true? Do riders know everything there is to know when it comes to the so-called marginal gains? My French isn’t good enough, and the paywall in front of this article, is too good for me to tell whether some of the riders are casting aspersions and the rest are actually OK with it. It’s not that hard to find a handful of complainers in a large enough crowd of individuals. There are always a few shit-talkers around.

Against my better judgment…