One after another, the riders attending an Ineos Grenadiers training camp in Spain earlier this year filed into room 101.
Inside what seemed a typical hotel suite, they were confronted not by their worst fears but by scientists from a university in Norway armed with a large, metal box with two tubes and a mouthpiece. This, they understood, was something called a carbon monoxide rebreather machine, with the cyclists invited to sit on a bed before being asked to inhale a mixture of oxygen and the poisonous gas for five to six minutes. They then had a short break, maybe 15 or 20 minutes, before doing it all over again.
Among those tested were teenagers as well as seasoned professionals. What is perhaps more questionable is the timing of the tests and how they were conducted.
Carbon monoxide rebreathing, first developed in the 1980s, is controversial. It can be used to measure haemoglobin levels in blood to assess the impact of altitude training, but there are also concerns that more frequent inhalation of carbon monoxide could boost performance.
The 2024 Tour de France was overshadowed when the American cycling website Escape Collective revealed that a number of teams were using the testing method. It sent the UCI into a spin. The international governing body for cycling asked teams and riders in November 2024 to limit their usage to a single inhalation, for diagnostic purposes, while it looked to introduce new rules to address rider safety.
At that Tour, some teams admitted using carbon monoxide rebreathers, but Ineos Grenadiers denied to journalists they were among them. Now, they have confirmed to The Times that their position has changed.
At precisely the point when other teams began to say they would no longer conduct the tests — amid unwelcome scrutiny and intense ethical debate — Ineos started asking their riders to be tested using this method.
On February 1, the very day the rules were published, cyclists on that Ineos training camp in Spain were being tested in a way that the UCI has indicated is now banned. The new rules state that only a single inhalation of carbon monoxide would be permitted for testing purposes, with a second test allowed two weeks later. Ineos did not break any rules that evening because the regulations did not come into effect until February 10.
According to the Ineos Grenadiers itinerary shared with riders and senior staff and seen by The Times, four riders had these tests for haemoglobin in the blood — known as Hbmass tests — on January 31 and they were followed, the next evening, by three more.
Ineos were staying at the Syncrosfera fitness & health hotel near Dénia in eastern Spain, which was founded by Alexandr Kolobnev, a Russian former professional cyclist who tested positive during the 2011 Tour for a banned diuretic that can reduce weight and act as a masking agent for performance-enhancing drugs. He escaped a ban when the Court of Arbitration for Sport rejected a UCI appeal by ruling that the use of the drug was justified for “medical reasons”, with the Swiss court upholding a Russian tribunal decision to limit his sanction to a fine and a reprimand.
Kolobnev’s hotel is popular with cycling teams, not least because it boasts certain treatment facilities as well as altitude simulation rooms. On the grounds of medical confidentiality, The Times cannot name the riders listed for Hbmass testing in room 101. Among them, however, were teenagers.
It is understood that the riders had to sign consent forms before undergoing the tests, which were overseen by a professor at the Inland University in Lillehammer, Norway, who is now working exclusively for Q36.5 — the team for which Britain’s Tom Pidcock rides — and who was also staying at the Syncrosfera hotel that week.
According to two sources, not all the riders summoned to room 101 that evening were either staying in an altitude simulation room or training at altitude at that time. They also said at least one of the riders felt nauseous and experienced some discomfort breathing by the end of both those back-to-back tests.
The Times spoke to a number of experts who insist it would not be unusual to conduct two Hbmass tests a few minutes apart. They call the second a “duplicate test”, from which they take what they consider a more reliable, average measurement.
The Times asked the UCI if a second, duplicate test would now be permitted when the regulation states “only one CO inhalation”. A further question concerned whether a standard hotel room, with a bed and an en-suite bathroom, at the Syncrosfera qualified as “a medical facility”.
A UCI spokesman responded: “For the ban on repeated inhalation of carbon monoxide, we refer all questions to the UCI regulations as they are stated in the UCI medical rules. These rules clearly state what applies to all licence-holders, teams and/or bodies subject to the UCI regulations and to anyone else who might possess such equipment on behalf of riders or teams.”
Those rules state: “A CO inhalation to measure total Hbmass should only be carried out once. A second CO inhalation, and therefore a second measure of total Hbmass, may however be carried out two weeks after the initial measurement.”
Ineos Grenadiers, founded in 2009 and owned by Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s petrochemicals company since 2019, insists it has done nothing wrong.
‘It’s not like we’re breathing exhaust pipes every day from cars’
Theoretically, regular carbon monoxide inhalation could boost the oxygen-carrying capacity of an athlete’s blood by increasing the red cell count in much the same way as synthetic erythropoietin (EPO), with the benefit of being extremely hard to detect and, at the time of Escape Collective’s story in 2024, unregulated. It could, of course, come with obvious risks; the threat of hypoxia, even death.
The three teams that admitted during the 2024 Tour to using carbon monoxide rebreather machines said it was only for testing haemoglobin levels in the blood, explaining that they conduct Hbmass tests at the beginning and end of altitude training camps to measure the impact of riding in the mountains on any given rider.
Tadej Pogacar, the four-times Tour de France champion whose UAE Team Emirates were one of those three, initially denied any knowledge of the practice only to confirm 24 hours later that he had undergone “the pretty simple” test with a rebreather machine on one occasion.
“It’s like a two or three-minute-long test,” he said. “You breathe into a balloon for one minute and then you see the haemoglobin mass. It’s not like we’re breathing exhaust pipes every day from cars.”
His team then insisted it was a “well-established, safe, professional method that is backed by a very large amount of research”. By December, the team said it had no future plans to use carbon rebreather testing while complaining that the Escape Collective story was “sensationalist”. The article suggests riders may even be doing “super altitude” training by combining training camps in the mountains with carbon monoxide use.
Visma-Lease a Bike and Israel-Premier Tech dismissed these allegations, insisting they had conducted such tests only in a diagnostic capacity, with Visma’s Jonas Vingegaard, the Dane with whom Pogacar has shared the past six Tour titles, claiming “there is nothing suspicious about it”.
Romain Bardet, a French rider who has twice finished on the podium in the Tour’s general classification, is not so sure about that. In November he suggested the use of carbon monoxide might represent a new form of abuse that could explain the sudden improvement of certain riders.
A sense of panic spread across cycling. In the same month, the Movement for Credible Cycling, an organisation that does not include Ineos, comprising teams that claim to want a clean sport, said that they “strongly advise against the use of this technique . .. until it’s banned”.
The UCI also advised teams and riders against repeated inhalation on November 26 and requested the World Anti-Doping Agency take a position on the matter. The agency said non-diagnostic use would be banned.
By then, the UCI had introduced its own more stringent rules. On February 1, its plea to limit carbon monoxide use to a single inhalation became regulation.
It said that repeated inhalation can cause serious health problems such as headaches, lethargy, nausea, dizziness and confusion, and that these symptoms can develop into problems with heart rhythm, seizures, paralysis and loss of consciousness.
In a statement, the UCI said: “The inhalation of CO will remain authorised within a medical facility and under the responsibility of a medical professional experienced in the manipulation of this gas for medical reasons and in line with the following restrictions: only one CO inhalation to measure total Hbmass will be permitted. A second CO inhalation will only be authorised two weeks after the initial Hb measurement.”
By the Tour de France earlier this summer, the debate around carbon monoxide rebreathers had gone quiet; at least until now.
‘Of course we have been adhering to the rules and regulations’
Ineos Grenadiers have already been scarred by their association with convicted doping doctors and were accused, in their former guise as Team Sky, by a parliamentary committee of crossing an ethical line over their use of medical exemptions, with particular reference to the steroid injections Sir Bradley Wiggins received before the 2012 Tour de France — which he won — and two other major races.
At this summer’s Tour de France, the team, once again under the leadership of Sir Dave Brailsford — who had returned to cycling after a spell at Manchester United, who Ineos co-own — were confronted by allegations linking their chief rider carer, David Rozman, to a German doping ring. Rozman was sent home from the Tour having acknowledged that he is now the subject of an investigation by the International Testing Agency, which runs anti-doping for the UCI.
When asked by The Times on Tuesday if the team had ever used carbon monoxide rebreather testing, a spokesman for Ineos Grenadiers said: “The UCI made an announcement on this issue over eight months ago, in February, and of course we have been adhering to their rules and regulations.”
It was only when confronted with The Times’s knowledge of the testing in Spain, and the fact that the team’s director of communications had denied conducting tests during the 2024 Tour de France, that Ineos confirmed their use of carbon monoxide following the 2024 season.
Ineos were also asked if they accepted that the way the tests were conducted in Spain would now be in breach of the new rules.
They did not answer that specific question, but did respond with a number of points. They said it was a measurement method in the 1980s and “used widely” in sport “ever since”. They said they had not used it in 2024 or any previous season. This would include the period between 2012 and 2019 when the team guided four different riders to seven Tour de France titles.
They said that it was only as “a diagnostic tool”, to measure a rider’s response to altitude or heat stress training. They said it had never been used to enhance performance and stressed, once again, that they always adhere to UCI rules.
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