The UCI announces its anti-doping plan for the Tour de France 2025

During the Tour de France 2025 that begins next Saturday, July 5, the UCI will carry out a huge deployment of resources in anti-doping matters led by the International Testing Agency in order to preserve the integrity of cycling in the most important event of this sport. These measures also extend to surveillance against technological fraud, with checks also being improved.

Huge UCI deployment to ensure a doping-free Tour de France 2025

More than 40 agents from the International Testing Agency (ITA), around 350 out-of-competition tests during the month leading up to the start of the Tour de France, over 600 analyses throughout the race that will be stored for 10 years in case new detection methods and prohibited substances appear. These are the numbers with which the International Cycling Union has presented its anti-doping plan for the 2025 edition of the Tour de France, which begins in just a few days.

A surveillance strategy that is not only based on dedicating more resources but also on applying these resources in a more intelligent way, taking into account factors such as the evolution of cyclists' performance or the information collected by the intelligence department of the World Testing Agency in order to close in on cheaters as much as possible.

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Control tasks in which the ITA will have the close collaboration of the French Anti-Doping Agency, which will help with information exchange and provide personnel for the implementation and monitoring of controls.

Since last year, the ITA, the body to which the UCI delegated the anti-doping fight in 2021, has been strengthening the human resources dedicated to conducting controls and storing samples, of which 490 have been reanalyzed, considered "at risk," although ultimately all of them tested negative. In any case, the ITA is developing a new monitoring tool that includes the power data of cyclists in competition in order to more easily detect suspicious performances that allow them to focus tests on possible cheaters.

The fight against technological fraud is also not overlooked, and despite never having found hidden motors in road competitions, the UCI maintains its continuous checks for the deterrent effect they provide.

In this way, before each stage, UCI technicians will inspect the bikes in the teams' buses using magnetic tablets, during the stages, every bike change will be closely monitored to detect suspicious changes, and at the end of the stage, a thorough check of the winner's bike, the leaders of the different classifications, those determined as suspicious during the stage, and several random cyclists will be carried out. These checks are done using x-rays of the bicycles.