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.