The Dark Secret Behind Cycling’s Legal Drug Problem

Today, Anthony takes listeners deep inside one of pro cycling’s most uncomfortable truths — the legal but dangerous world of painkiller use. For decades, riders were handed codeine and similar drugs to help them “push through” the agony of racing — a chemical crutch that wasn’t banned but carried heavy consequences. How did teams justify dosing their athletes in the name of performance and recovery? And what happens to those riders when the race is over and the pills stop? This episode exposes how blurred the line between care and exploitation really is in the peloton.

If you enjoyed this video you will love our other piece of content – The Dark Secret Behind Hidden Motors In Cycling – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s-oGZAl0qE

Chapters –

0:00 The Dark Secret Of Drug Abuse In Pro Cycling
0:22 Chemical Help From The Pain Is Part Of The Sport
2:28 Tramadol Use
5:24 Was Painkiller Abuse Encouraged By Team Doctors?
6:58 Nairo Quintana Gets Popped And Loses Tour De France Result
9:10 The Shocking Amount Of Painkiller Use – It’s HUGE

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You’re watching the dark secret behind painkiller use in cycling. And here’s the twist. A lot of what I’m going to tell you today, a lot of what I’m going to talk about, it was totally legal. That’s why a professional cyclist could openly say he used an opioidbased painkiller, Tramodol, to get through time trials. So, if legality wasn’t the lion, what is? And who’s protecting riders when pain becomes team policy? Every year, cyclists line up for races where pain, it’s so incredible that some people can’t even get to the finish line without chemical help. And we’re not talking about banned doping agents. We’re talking about painkillers. Many of them perfectly legal. For many riders, this isn’t about cheating. It’s about surviving. It’s about staying in a contract, proving to their team DS, that they’re reliable. In a sport where pain is a currency, being able to suppress pain, it gives a competitive edge. And the culture trickles down. amateur riders, weekend warriors, grandfo enthusiasts, we all copy what we see at the top table, often without medical supervision. And the result is quiet legal dependence that few people are willing to talk about. I remember noticing this back god, it’s a good few years ago, 2019, a friend of mine, I better not name him, let’s call him Dan. H Dan came off bad off out mountain biking. He broke his ribs and he dislocated his shoulder. And he was racing again like 3 weeks later. And I remember asking him how and he smiled. Ibuprofen, coding, and a little bit of grit. I thought he was just hard ass, but I guess not. Then I heard the same story again from a rider at a very different level. Different injuries, but the exact same pills. And the statistics confirmed cycling consistently ranks among the highest sports for painkiller use. Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen and diclopenac are treated like nutrition products part of the race kit. But these drugs, they don’t heal anything. They simply mute pain signals, making it easier to finish today and harder to recover tomorrow. And this didn’t start recently. In the 1950s, writers joked about lab bomba. This was a cocktail of stimulants and painkillers that was designed to survive the Alps. The substance have evolved. amphetamines, cortisone, codin. But the mindset has stayed. When the big doping scandals of the 1990s and 2000s forced cycling to clean up, the chemistry didn’t just vanish overnight. It just shifted into legal gray zones, substances that weren’t banned, but blurred the line between care and enhancement. They started to prevail. And that’s where tramodol enters this story. For years, tramodol was a legal opioid in cycling. It wasn’t on the world anti-doping ay’s prohibited list. And it wasn’t banned by the UCI until 2019. Teams prescribed it to dull chronic pain, but riders internally, well, they discovered that if they took a low dose, well, that took the edge off race day discomfort without technically breaking any rule. The official line was responsible medical use. But unofficially, the reality on team buses was this became routine. Tramodol, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s a synthetic opioid. It’s the weaker cousin of morphine that you see in like Saving Private Ryan getting given to lads who’ve lost a leg. It’s often prescribed postsurgery to give pain relief. It can dull pain and create a mild sense of calm and euphoria. But there’s also a bunch of side effects if you read the label on it. Like I scanned the label and the ones that jumped out at me are like dizziness, nausea, drowsiness, and repeated use has been shown to lead to dependency. Those effects creep up quietly which is why so many people underestimate Tramodol. Irish rider and former national champ super respected rider in the pelaton Nicholas Roach. He gave one of the clearest glimpses into this world in 2015. He gave an interview with controversial Irish journalist Paul Kimage. And Roach said that he used Tramodol for some time trials. He emphasized it wasn’t magic and he hadn’t felt drowsy after it. Importantly at the time this was completely legal. There was no rule against it. Roach wasn’t sitting down here confessing to doping. He was describing standard practice inside the World Tour Pelaton. He was riding for Team Sky at the time. And that’s precisely what makes this revealing. When a respected rider can speak casually about using an opioid for a time trial. We’re not talking about to treat pain postsurgery here. We’re simply talking about the pain of holding an arrow position for 60 minutes. It shows how far the culture drifted. The problem wasn’t rulebreaking. The problem was that the rules allowed this. The legality provided cover for this. It let teams and riders believe they were on safe ethical ground. But the physiological and psychological risks, but they don’t care about regulations. Tramodol causes dizziness, nausea, drowsiness, and dependency. We just said, who cares about what the regulations say? Maybe this is the important part. Allowing it for so long in cycling, it shaped cycling culture. If something helps you ride through pain and it isn’t banned, why not take it? Okay, let’s pause for a second here because I’m genuinely curious because if I put myself onto that team bus in those circumstances, I’m curious what I would do in that situation. Would I take the painkillers? Because they’re not technically against the rules. I would argue they’re morally wrong. They’re definitely not in the spirit of sport. Let me know in the comments below. Like, would you take them? Okay, let’s jump back in to the early 2010s. The painkiller culture in cycling, it wasn’t secret at this point. It was standard operating procedure among teams. Doctors track dosage charts like coaches track training zones. Riders carried tablets beside gels in their back pocket. The line between medicine and performance was so blurred that even insiders struggled to tell which side of this line they were on. And for years, Tramodol, it sat right in the middle of that blurry zone. It wasn’t banned. It wasn’t hidden. And because it worked, it became normalized. But the side effects, they were quietly stacking up on riders. Team doctors began to notice riders getting laded mid-stage, reacting a couple of seconds too slow to avoid that crash. A few riders even blacked out. On paper, they were healthy. On the road, they were a danger to themselves and everyone around them. The slow drip of incidents led to growing pressure on cycling’s governing body, the UCI. In early 2019, the UCI finally drew a hard line. Tramodol was to be banned in competition. The reasoning wasn’t doping. It was safety. Dizziness, drowsiness, nausea. All pretty undesirable side effects for somebody who’s descending a mountain at 90 km an hour. I think we’ll agree it was the end of an era. But as cycling so often proves, every ending writes a sequel. For a few seasons, the rules seem to work. Testing tightened. Teams scrub Tramodol from medical kits. But then in 2022, the first big test arrived. Legendary Colombian climber Naro Canana, twice a grand tour winner, and one of the most respected riders in South America of all time. He finished sixth in that year’s tour to France. Weeks later, the UCI announced that two of his race day samples contained Tramodol. Under the new rules, that meant disqualification. Narro Canana denied taking tramodol. His lawyers argued that the result was flawed. This went to the court of arbitration for sport. They reviewed the case and they upheld the UCI’s decision. Canana lost his tour to France result. Not banned, but erased. That distinction is important. We’ll come back to that. It was the first high-profile proof that Cycling knew, as they were calling it, the medicine era, that it had teeth. Yet, it also revealed a deeper confusion. The drug was banned by the UCI, Cycling’s governing body, but not by Wada, the global anti-doping agency. So, technically, Canana hadn’t broken any doping rules. Was it legal? Was it illegal? It really depended on which rule book that you opened. That contradiction summed up the sports entire relationship with painkillers. A web of rules, gray zones, and loopholes that even professionals struggle to navigate around. And while the UCI celebrated its new stance, the Pelaton does what the Pelaton always does. It adapted because the demand didn’t vanish with the ban. The pain stayed the same. The stages stayed the same brutal length with these horrific gradients. The expectation to push through everything stayed the same. So Reuters and doctors looked for the next legal fix. The name that surfaced was top antidol, a newer opioid chemically related to tramodol but roughly 10 times stronger and crucially legal. The movement for credible cycling MPCC immediately raised alarms. They call this the next tramodol and urged the UCI to act before it spread like wildfire through the pelaton. These bands, they move slower than the chemistry does all the time. By the time the committees debate, the bottles are already in team buses. They’re getting passed around the pelaton. The extent of painkiller use inside cycling teams. This has been documented in numerous official studies and investigations. This isn’t speculation. like a wa a wada monitoring report back in 2017 found tramodol in 4.4% 4% of cycling samples, the highest rate of any Olympic sport. And a 2018 paper in the British Sports Journal of Medicine described how painkillers were often taken prophylactically, that means before a race even started. And cycling’s independent reform commission found that teams routinely organized cortisone programs as part of race preparation. These findings reveal that pain management wasn’t a secret. It was structured. It wasn’t a rogue culture. This was policy. And that’s what makes this story so difficult. It’s not about cheaters hiding syringes. It’s about a system that quietly designs around discomfort, institutionalizing the belief that pain is a flaw that we can erase. Because the drugs may change, but that mindset doesn’t. And the irony of all this is the pain was never the enemy. Pain was the signal, the body’s last honest voice in a sport that we’ve built on silence. And when you numb it long enough, I can remember vividly a December training spin. I was on the back roads. There was fog, wet leaves, potholes everywhere. I was riding on a descent, one-handed, trying to stab this tiny little mode button and praying the battery would last until the final climb of the day. You know that anxiety, the is it going to die anxiety? It totally ruins your ride. And the truth is, for years that was normal. Every season I got into this repetitive cycle. I’d end up buying a new set of lights in the winter. Normally plastic lights, plastic brackets which would invariably snap, charging ports which would fail, and batteries that would fade. Most lights feel very disposable. They’re shiny for the winter and then straight into the bin at the end of the winter and we repeat again the following winter. That all changed when I got my first set of exposure lights. Suddenly, this wasn’t a consumable anymore. This was a piece of kit built to last a lifetime. That’s why I’m absolutely buzzing about the fully updated exposure range. Reflex 2.0 automatically adjusts the brightness of your light. It dials it down when you’re going at slower speeds on the climbs and then unleashes the full power of the lumens on the descent so your hands stay where they need to be on the bars so you don’t actually crash. There’s another really cool feature. It’s called reserve mode and it kicks in when run time hits zero. It drops to a low beam and you get another 30 minutes to get you out of trouble and get you home. USBC charging is a total gamecher to my mind. It means you can get now 70% faster charging. But importantly for me, you can top up your lights from a power bank midride. So if you’re doing an ultra, a bike packing trip, or you’re going on an event like me at Badlands, just plug it into the power bank and away you go. No need to worry about batteries failing. Exposure isn’t just another set of lights. This is the last set of lights you’re ever going to need to buy. Go to exposure.com to check out their full range. You forget what the pain was actually trying to say. In cycling, pain is built legends. Think of those iconic shots of people suffering through pain. But each generation, if you notice of cycling riders that come true, each generation tries to claim this moral high ground. They think they’re slightly better and cast dispersions down on the previous generation. Amphetamines, well, they gave way to cortisone. Cortisone gave way to tramodol. And now it’s topol. It’s ketrofine. It’s micro doses. The chemistry changes. The logic doesn’t because the real problem isn’t the pill. It’s a system that reward those who can suffer longest, who and it punishes those who can’t suffer as long. Teams don’t hand out painkillers because they’re reckless. They do it because the structure demands it. Sponsors expect visibility. Races expect finishes. Contracts expect results. And in that equation, pain isn’t a warning. It’s a variable to be managed. The human cost of all this though. It’s buried under the data. Take a second and listen to the voices. Listen to the retired riders from the previous generation. Michael Barry, David Miller. No one thinks this is a good thing. Riders retire with chronic gut issues, with damaged kidneys, with blunted emotions. Some never learn to feel normal pain again. Cycling is trying to evolve. The UCI now tests for Tramodol. The MPCC pushes for stronger ethical codes. And doctors, for the first time, I’ve heard them talk openly about duty of care. But as long as the pressure remains to finish, to perform, to endure, the temptation will always shift shape. The next painkiller, it won’t look like the last painkiller. It’ll be smarter. It’ll be legal. until it isn’t. The only real fix isn’t chemical, it’s cultural. It’s deciding that pain isn’t a weakness, that it’s information. Because if pain builds cycling, maybe listening to it is what saves cycling. Thanks for tuning in. If you’re liking this format of video, please take a second, let us know in the comments below. 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