The Tour’s 7-day COVID testing window resets right before next round of tests
After a few days of uncertainty and confusion over the COVID-19 testing protocol at the Tour de France, organizers and the French government have decided that the seven-day window tracking positive tests within a team will reset ahead of the second rest day, according to Reuters and other outlets.
That determination is big news for the Ineos Grenadiers, Mitchelton-Scott, Cofidis, and AG2R-La Mondiale, each of whom had one staff member test positive for COVID-19 on the Tour’s first rest day.
In the run-up to the Tour, the UCI announced that safety protocols would stipulate that any team with two members, either riders or staff, testing positive within a seven-day window would be removed from the race. The organization then moved to relax those rules to specify that only two positive rider tests would trigger removal, but after pushback from the French government, the original plan was re-affirmed.
Confusion arose, however, after positive tests emerged on the first rest day, due to the fact that the next round of mandated testing would come exactly seven days later on the second rest day. The initial rules left some uncertainty over whether those two rounds of testing, seven days apart, would both fall within the all-important seven-day window.
If so, a single positive test on that second rest day within any of the teams that already recorded positive tests would have triggered removal from the Tour. According to reports, however, the UCI and the French government have now decided that the testing window of the first rest day will reset prior to the second.
In other words, unless riders or staff from one of those four teams test positive ahead of the rest day when testing is done only on a case-by-case basis, they will each return to having both of their “two strikes” for the next round of race-wide testing.
While more than one positive test at that time will still trigger removal from the race, the clarification will surely come as welcome news to Egan Bernal, Romain Bardet, and the many other big names on those four teams that are not quite as close to removal from the race than they might have otherwise been.
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