Tour de – With the Tour getting under way while the FIFA World Cup captures global attention, Andres Iniesta—now running the NSN Cycling team—arrives in a city that carries his own sporting legacy. The team’s first Tour of France mission puts a spotlight on new ways to
The Tour de France starts with a familiar collision of attention: while much of the sporting world is locked onto the FIFA World Cup, another storyline is already moving underneath it—Tadej Pogacar chasing what would be a record fifth Tour title.
For NSN Cycling, this is the first Tour de France in the team’s history. The mission begins in the city where Andres Iniesta has legendary status. a detail that doesn’t get lost on the people making the calls behind the scenes. Iniesta is no longer a player on a pitch. but he presides over a team that’s trying to earn its place in a sport that still runs on money problems of its own.
Iniesta arrived at a pre-race news conference and reflected on the gap between what fans see and what it takes to build a cycling operation.
“Once you get to see the sport from the inside, it’s absolutely fascinating,” he said. “From the outside, you mostly see the riders, but you don’t see all the strategy and hard work that goes on behind the scenes. That’s what surprised me the most.”
His focus is not only on the road. He also wants NSN Cycling to represent something—an identity that can survive beyond the results that come and go.
“We’ve tried to create values for our team. I think fans can love our team because we are trying to make something special,” Iniesta said.
That “something special” is happening against a backdrop of unanswered questions about money. New ways to monetise cycling—so teams do not have to rely solely on sponsors—are still being discussed. Cycling, after all, does not have the free-market TV rights cashflow of the sport in which Iniesta made his name.
On the sporting side, NSN Cycling brings sprinter Girmay into the picture—one of the best in his discipline—but the team’s day-to-day reality is also shaped by the headache of logistics, budgets, and building a race-ready machine from scratch.
And while the Tour’s start line is where the spotlight turns, cycling’s hardest conversations never fully stay off the calendar. Doping remains one of them, even as the sport tries to protect the public image it earned the hard way.
The International Testing Agency is carrying out a feasibility study into using power data as part of its anti-doping strategy. At the same time. the Swiss group in charge of anti-doping for cycling’s world governing body the UCI is working with five teams to gather data. The goal is to support more traditional methods—blood and urine analysis—through the athlete biological passport.
Within cycling, there is scepticism. Some riders and figures in the sport question whether adding power data will bring any real extra benefit in a discipline that, for more than five years, has not had a major doping controversy.
But even that argument doesn’t erase what still sits uncomfortably under the sport’s marketing push. Lower-level riders are still being caught, and the average speeds in the big races are creeping up. The issue never entirely goes away because cycling. hurt by past scandals. is working to build and maintain a clean image.
The Tour de France 2026 is starting on a global stage crowded by the FIFA World Cup. Yet for Pogacar. for NSN Cycling. and for the people trying to keep cycling’s credibility intact. the timing only sharpens the pressure—because whatever happens on the roads will land in a sport that needs both answers and proof.
Tour de France 2026 Tadej Pogacar record fifth title Andres Iniesta NSN Cycling Girmay doping International Testing Agency UCI athlete biological passport power data blood and urine analysis