A positive doping test saved Tour de France yellow jersey Torstein Træen's life

Four years ago, Torstein Træen was battling testicular cancer. On Tuesday, the 30-year-old Norwegian pulled on the Tour de France's yellow jersey. On a battling stage 4, where a strong breakaway group took nearly 12 minutes on Tadej Pogacar’s yellow jersey group, Traen was the best placed of the front group. Træen’s road to the 2026 Tour de France is as inspiring as it gets, and it all started with a positive doping test.

Only three Norwegians have ever led the Tour de France. Træen’s team boss, Thor Hushovd, is one of them. And now so is Torstein Træen. For Uno-X Mobility, it is a moment that has been years in the making.

"I'm very proud of Torstein and the whole team," Hushovd told CyclingNews at the finish, reflecting on what the moment meant for a squad built entirely from Norwegian and Danish riders. One of the images of the day was the entire Uno-X team waiting at the podium to cheer for their first yellow jersey, despite the sweltering heat. But who is Torstein Træen?

“It’s quite hard for me to understand how big it is," Træen said to the media at the finish. "You can see the face of my old coach, the face of the soigneur, you can see how special it is. In a couple of days it will sink in [for me], but the Tour is the biggest race in the world and now I just have to enjoy it.

Træen's route to that yellow jersey began when the then 26-year-old failed a doping test at the Volta a Catalunya in May 2022. The Uno-X rider returned elevated levels of hCG, a hormone that can signal certain cancers. Days later, doctors confirmed a tumour.

The team doctor told Træen that he had returned a positive for hCG from the Volta a Catalunya by phone. It was a call that arrived just as he was enjoying the best form of his career, having also won the mountains classification at that year's Tour of the Alps.

Træen has since admitted the diagnosis initially felt unreal. "I thought it was nonsense at first," he said, before doctors explained what the test result meant. Surgery to remove the affected testicle followed within weeks. A 15mm tumour was found, but caught early enough that Træen avoided chemotherapy altogether.

By the following spring, he was already racing again. Returning to the Tour of the Alps in 2023, the race where his illness had gone undetected a year earlier, he came within a whisker of a stage win. "I raced here last year with cancer and didn't know it," he said afterwards, visibly moved to be back competing at the same race.

The comeback did not stop there. In 2024, riding for Bahrain Victorious, Træen won a stage of the Tour de Suisse on the climb nicknamed after Gino Mäder, the young Swiss rider who died in a crash at the same race the year before. "This win was for Gino," Træen said, dedicating the victory to his memory.

A year later came the 2025 Vuelta a España, where Træen wore the red leader's jersey for four stages and finished ninth overall. It was proof that his climbing legs, and his career, had fully returned.

That form carried Træen, now back at Uno-X Mobility, into the decisive breakaway on stage 4 of the 2026 Tour de France. Riding through searing heat, Træen and American rival Sean Quinn (EF Education-EasyPost) were the biggest threats to Tadej Pogačar's overall lead.

Træen played it smart, matching Quinn's moves and profiting from Lidl-Trek’s hard work to deliver Mads Pedersen the win. "The possibility of wearing the yellow jersey was real," he said of the closing kilometres, though he was careful not to celebrate before the finish line.

He now leads Quinn by 28 seconds overall, with Mathias Vacek (Lidl-Trek) third at 3:53. Pogačar sits fourth, 7:53 down, the furthest he has ever trailed in yellow.

For Hushovd and Uno-X Mobility, a team that recruits exclusively from Norway and Denmark, it is a landmark achievement. "We have a different team compared to others," Hushovd said. "It makes us very proud when we pull off a major goal like taking the Tour de France yellow."

Human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG, is a hormone naturally produced during pregnancy. In women, its presence is entirely normal and is, in fact, the basis of standard pregnancy tests. In men, however, elevated hCG has no natural explanation. It can be a marker of testicular cancer, but it is also used as a performance-enhancing drug, since it stimulates the testes to produce more testosterone.

For that reason, hCG is prohibited in male athletes under the World Anti-Doping Agency's Prohibited List, a code the UCI applies to professional cycling. Riders are tested for it both in and out of competition. It was exactly this kind of test, a routine, unannounced doping control rather than any symptom, that first flagged Træen's illness in 2022.

How long Træn will be able to hold onto the yellow jersey will be a fascinating question over the next (possibly) 10 stages. With such an inspiring backstory, there will be a lot of support for Træen and Uno-X in the coming days.