The Tour de France has a chequered history that cannot be forgotten.
“He knows what the record is,” Lance Armstrong said on social media following Sunday’s result, referring to Pogacar.
The American’s record of seven Tour de France victories between 1999 and 2005 has long since been wiped from the record books following the revelation of his systematic doping.
And those in the sport have fairly diligently avoided mentioning his name since.
But the night-time anti-doping tests during this year’s Tour, which the International Testing Agency (ITA) told BBC Sport were undertaken as an “exceptional operation” and because time was of the essence, once again raised questions in a sport which doesn’t need them, thanks to that dark past.
Testing at such anti-social hours is rare and requires additional permission, and some suspect it may have been a factor in Jonas Vingegaard’s Tour-ending crash after he was woken at 2am in the morning the previous night, and Pogacar himself at 5am.
Others were tested at night, too, and all riders were tested during the race. But what were the ITA looking for?
They wouldn’t say, specifically, but one possible explanation for night-time testing of professional cyclists appears to be to gather as much information as possible to try to understand micro-dosing. That is where an athlete could take performance-enhancing drugs, such as red blood cell stimulant EPO or anabolic steroids, in very small quantities to evade detection on the Athlete Biological Passport, which is endorsed by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) and used across cycling.
There is no suggestion of wrongdoing in the case of Pogacar, Vingegaard or any of those tested at night this year.
Past findings produced by Wada suggest micro-dosing could evade detection methods, and so the scope to cheat in professional sport remains, meaning all efforts must be taken to ensure nobody beats the system.
The ITA cannot confirm when the results of the Tour tests will be made public, but EF Education-Easypost boss Jonathan Vaughters told BBC Sport: “Doubts? Actually [those tests] solve my doubts.”
Vaughters, who doped during his riding career, is now reformed.
He said during this year’s race: “If we had 24-hour testing in 2001 when EPO tests were first introduced we would have had a huge number of riders excluded from the sport, including me. And it would have saved 25 years of drama.
“So I mean we wouldn’t have had to go through Lance Armstrong… The problem would have been solved immediately in 2000.
“If you introduce a low enough dose of a peptide hormone, the clearance time can be four hours – if you take it at 11 it’ll be out of the system at 3am, so it makes a difference. The testing technology is evolving quickly.
“If you want to watch a clean sport, watch cycling, most other sports’ testing is a complete joke.
“Why is cycling so hyper-focused? History. This is human F1 car racing; this is edge of human performance; boundaries are always going to be pushed.”
Many riders and team bosses won’t go near the ‘D’ word, and the consensus is ‘believe what you are seeing’ when Pogacar accelerates away and wins by, at times, a matter of minutes, and when others perform their own remarkable feats in the saddle.
