It is 2am. A knock at a hotel door somewhere in France. Jonas Vingegaard, one of the sport's biggest stars, answers it — and the International Testing Agency is standing there, needle ready. That moment, which also happened to Tadej Pogacar at 5am during this year's Tour de France, sits at the heart of a fierce debate cycling's rulers are now confronting openly.

David Lappartient, the UCI president, addressed that debate on Tuesday at the start of stage two of the Tour de France Femmes in Aigle, Switzerland. He said he backed night-time testing, but only in exceptional circumstances. The logic is scientific and specific: micro-doses of EPO, the endurance-boosting drug, can become undetectable within six or seven hours of use. A test at 2am catches what an afternoon test simply cannot.

"For the riders to know that the ITA may come, that's always a fear," Lappartient said — and fear, he argued, is precisely the point. Whether the 2025 Tour was actually clean is a question that hinges on silence. The ITA issued no press release about the race, and Lappartient says that is itself the answer, since the agency only publishes announcements when results are positive. Critics might call that absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence, but the UCI president was firm.

"We didn't see any press release in the Tour de France, so it seems there was nothing in the Tour," he said. Lappartient, re-elected unopposed to a third UCI term in September 2024, also took an indirect swipe at embattled FIFA president Gianni Infantino, praising his own organisation's consultation with teams, riders and race organisers as a model of transparency. He was careful with his words — "I will not give advice to FIFA" — but the contrast he was drawing could hardly have been clearer.