Some, to borrow the phrase used by one sceptic, are, for now, keeping their hands by their sides. The main reason for that is the continuing presence of those with their own dark histories working within the engine rooms of leading teams, including Pogacar’s UAE Team Emirates.
The UAE Team Emirates operation is run by
Mauro Gianetti, team principal and CEO. The Swiss former professional, who spent three days in a coma in 1998 after being taken to hospital during the Tour de Romandie, has been at the heart of a series of notorious incidents over the past 25 years.
The most infamous would be the Saunier Duval scandal of 2008, when the Gianetti-managed team quit the Tour after their star rider Riccardo Riccò tested positive for a new generation EPO. Riccò was also fired, along with his teammate
Leonardo Piepoli, and the sponsorship ended soon afterwards.
But neither the UCI nor ASO, the promoter of the Tour, could say they hadn’t been warned, given that the British professional
David Millar, making his own comeback from a two-year doping ban, had written to both organisations expressing misgivings about Gianetti’s management, while riding for the team.
Gianetti and the Saunier Duval team manager, Matxin Fernández, later moved on to the Geox-TMC team, which included a rider called Juan José Cobo. The Spaniard had also raced for Gianetti at Saunier Duval. In 2011, to general surprise, Cobo burst through the ranks to win the Vuelta a España at the expense of
Chris Froome.
It took nearly a decade for Cobo to be finally stripped of that victory, to the benefit of Froome. The four-times Tour de France winner was recovering in July 2019 from his serious crash when he heard the news that Cobo had been found guilty of “a violation of the anti-doping rules [use of a banned substance] based on irregularities found in his Athlete Biological Passport in 2009 and 2011”.
On Monday, the scepticism towards Pogacar’s success was noted, but not dwelt on, in the pages of L’Équipe, the French sports newspaper owned by ASO. Gianetti’s management career, it said, had “often been tainted by doping scandals”, while Fernández was described as “dragging several ‘casseroles’ of doping cases”.