Matej Mohoric like Jonas Vingegaard and his compatriot Tadej Pogacar. The winner of the 2022 Milan-Sanremo, in fact, just like what happened to the Dane and the World Champion, was woken in the middle of the night in recent days to undergo an anti-doping check at the hotel where he was staying with his team, an episode that, in his case as well, interrupted one of the most important phases for riders competing in the Tour de France: that of recovery.

“I too had to take a test at 5 in the morning, a time that is practically in the middle of our night's sleep because we go to bed at midnight, since the stages end late, and we have breakfast at 10” revealed to the Slovenian news outlet Siol the thirty-one-year-old from Kranj, who then did not shy away from giving his personal explanation of what has happened in recent days at the Grande Boucle.

“The fact is that the agency that carries out the checks has a rather substantial budget and somehow it must justify it, so I think all of this serves them to demonstrate that checks are being carried out and working and that the sport is clean and fair” stated decisively a Mohoric convinced, like other insiders, that these checks in the middle of the night are the price to pay for the wrongdoings committed by others in past decades.  

“We are paying for the past of cycling, but it would still be good to have some limits, or at least to ensure that the rules are the same for everyone, because we know that the Frenchman who occupies the top positions in the general classification has not been subjected to any such check” analyzed the wearer of the yellow jersey from the 2023 Tour of Poland, calling for equal treatment among the athletes involved and launching, in a not-too-veiled manner, a jab at those who decided the names and methods with which to carry out this extra round of checks in French territory.