Rowe made life hell for riders returning from doping bans: "You betrayed me and the sport; f*ck you"

Rowe was known as a hothead on the bike. He was excluded from the Tour de France after an incident with Tony Martin. “If someone messed with me, I thought: I know who you are, I'm not going to get back at you now,” said the Welshman in the Watts Occurring podcast with Geraint Thomas. “But somewhere in the season, I'll get back at you. Maybe by catching up with a breakaway, holding them back, or giving them less space. But then they went in the book.”

Rowe was most critical of riders returning from a doping suspension. He even says that he specifically sought out those men in the peloton when they were at the start of a race together. “If someone had been caught, and it was really black and white that he was a cheater, I would just ride right past him. I did everything I could to get them.”

The 35-year-old team manager of AG2R La Mondiale, Decathlon, does not mention any names. Last year, however, he called Nairo Quintana a “rat” after his doping violations. The Colombian climber was suspended for testing positive for the potent painkiller Tramadol. The Brit called the biological passport a major development towards a clean sport.

As a rider, however, Rowe had absolutely no mercy. “I don’t understand why others didn’t do it. I made their lives hell. Because they didn’t deserve to come back, in my opinion, sometimes they shouted back, but mostly they didn’t. You cheated me and the sport; f*ck you. I think every rider had the same mentality.”

For the former cyclist, serving a suspension was not enough punishment. He came down hard on the returning cyclists. “You're an *sshole, you return to the sport and stand at the start with 160 guys, and everyone treats you like sh*t, which you deserve. Then you no longer want to hang around in that peloton. You could bully those kinds of guys out of the sport, back to where they belong.”

Rowe's words come not long after French doping offenders raised the alarm about their treatment. Former cyclist Marion Sicot and soccer player Paul Pogba, among others, noted that it felt like they were “suspended for life.” “One day, a suspended athlete will commit suicide, as I almost did,” Sicot said.