Electric motors are definitely one way to achieve this but it seems so crude to use a device that’s detectable after the race.
Instead, how about sealing up the downtube and filling it with a weakly exothermic gas producing mixture* and then adding some turbine blades — sorry I mean “triple butted crank stiffeners”, your honour — to the bottom bracket instead? One doesn’t normally pedal at 10,000 RPM so some other sort of gas-energy harvester design would be better but you get the idea.
In a similar way to the case of the [spoiler alert] man stabbed with an icicle, the evidence will neatly and literally evaporate into thin air**.
*Something on the chemical spectrum between “science fair volcano” and “sugar and fertilizer oh whoops I’ve made a pipe bomb” ought to do it.
I'm thinking one way to easily do motor doping is via the bike changes. A rider swaps a doped bike brought in by the team that wasn't checked at the start during the easy portions and rides 100km saving watts along the way. They then change back to a regular bike before things get intense and meanwhile the team finds a way to discreetly get rid of the doped bike.
After the stage the doping controls check the regular bike, but are unaware of the existence of the doped bike.
I used to give cancellara the benefit of the doubt. But after discovering the very very sneaky second bike change I think its very unlikely he didnt do mechanical doping.
Cancellara had a mechanical issue and did a first bike chance. The main mechanic jumps out of the car and gives him a new bike. A few km's later Breschel has a real issue and requests a new bike, but the main mechanic isnt in the car anymore resulting in Breschel getting the wrong bike, losing a lot of time and never returning to the front. A few km further the images show Cancellara suddenly sitting on his original bike.
What happened, at the point where cancellara did his first bike change, the stage makes a loop. The mechanic had to walk 500 meter to get on the other part of the stage. What does amateur footage reveal. In a turn everybody where makes the short turn, Cancellara goes wide where the main mechanic is waiting with the original bike and you see Cancellara do a lightning bike swap.
Its a sad thing but after all these years I am convinced Cancellara cheated.
You vastly overestimates that tiny battery and motor vs. the athlete's legs.
The only time it make sense is in sprints where it can contribute a significant torque increase for a short while. Over 100 km you might as well be better off without that weight.
There's a reason why all electric vehicles are heavy and burly looking electric bikes only have range of 20mi, and those batteries are not constrained by weight or shape to fit in a road bike tube.
AFAIK it used to be common sight in the 90's but they are not allowed to do that anymore. Reasons riders just swap bike at any doubt of issue, then they draft the "team cars caravan".
Wait now I'm imagining purely mechanical regenerative braking. Like the bike has no ability to generate its own power, but it has a spring (or compressed air or compressed liquid) inside the frame that contributes to turning the gearshaft but gets rewound/compressed while braking.
Is this possible? Would it be against the rules as written?
The UCI rules are... extensive; it's definitely disallowed [1]. Even if not, there's a rule along the lines of "any technical innovation must be pre-approved," and I am pretty confident it would not be.
[1] Probably by article 1.3.010: "The bicycle shall be propelled solely, through a chainset, by the legs (inferior muscular chain) moving in a circular movement, without electric or other assistance." - https://www.uci.org/regulations/3MyLDDrwJCJJ0BGGOFzOat
> Probably by article 1.3.010: "The bicycle shall be propelled solely, through a chainset, by the legs (inferior muscular chain) moving in a circular movement, without electric or other assistance."
Well that just says you need to build your regenerative braking system into the chainset. Use of stored energy is obviously allowed or else you couldn't make use of gravity when on a hill.
> Even if not, there's a rule along the lines of "any technical innovation must be pre-approved,"
What innovation? Mechanical energy storage is ancient technology.
>Use of stored energy is obviously allowed or else you couldn't make use of gravity when on a hill.
You've walked past gold in search of silver. A biking competition that disallowed the use of gravity would be wild. What would that even look like? How could it be run? Compressed air jets to maneuver bikes onto friction platforms? Entire courses built into the non-rotating sections of space stations? Racers suspended on bungee cords to counteract natural forces?
A device could be affixed to each bike that measures wheel speed, as well as pressure cells for the pedals. Any energy that can't be accounted for from the pedals would result in the brakes being automatically applied.
Advantages from wind would also be negated, but I believe that's in spirit of the rule. At first just a single wheel speed sensor could be used, but once the meta evolved to doing stoppies/wheelies on downhill sections both wheels would need to be fitted with one.
The UCI banned some handlebars that were regarded as too far forward, they've banned elbows being too high, they've banned handlebars pointing slightly inwards. They'll ban anything that's even slightly out the ordinary and with no reasons given.
Not the person you responded to, but there are a number of changes they have banned, arguably for being too effective. Aerodynamic covers are not usable, recumbents are not usable (especially not ones with a cover, which are significantly faster).
I mean, I kinda get it, it's a traditional upright bicycle race where they want the human factor to dominate. But somewhere in there's a ~65% performance improvement they are leaving on the table (that is the difference in the "1 hour distance record" between traditional and fully faired recumbents).
> The actual unwritten rule is not so much against inventions, as against having any fun.
The rules, written or not, are about trying to adjudicate a competition of people, if you want a no holds bared technology based competition nothing precludes creating a different one (or participating in one, there’s no dearth of alleycat races and other odd events like the singlespeed world championship).
>The rules, written or not, are about trying to adjudicate a competition of people
Wouldn't this be best done by having one group make a bunch of identical bikes that are randomly assigned? Anything more than this and it is allowing some technology innovations and customization, regardless of if the reason is deemed justifiable or not.
You could, but you'd still have a similar problem. Imagine that footraces all had to be run in the same model shoes, in whatever size.
Human body variation far exceeds any kind of standard sizing. There's a reason that anything that fits a body often has hundreds of different competing designs and materials and size specs and different people are more comfortable with different ones.
It's bordering intractable to try to make a "standard" bike that fits the full variation of human bodies. Making that a requirement for a race would favor people who happen to have bodies more congruent with whatever your geometry and materials and sizing quantum are.
What irks me a bit is that they are supposed to be about bikes, but in reality they are only about bikes that look exactly like the ones they have in mind.
Eg (if I remember right) they also specify a minimum wheel radius, because at some point people started doing well with those, and the people in charge didn't like that.
And they might as well be right: they have an entertainment business to run. They don't care about finding the best or anything like that.
I disagree that the sport is about bikes. I think the sport is about cyclists. The olympics is particular is built around human athletic competition not technical competition.
How do you find the best cyclist if the quality of the bikes is wildly different?
In any experiment, you have to control for the factors other than the ones you're looking to test. I don't think its fair to say that they don't care about finding the best, they're just trying to find the best of a different category than you're interested in.
As GP said. There is also space for different competitions about technology (in motorsport, formula 1 has both a driver championship and a constructor championship which is about the technology).
Ever go to a go kart track and notice that some karts are faster than others? They're all identical as far as the eye can see, but in reality tons of subtle differences pop up.
You can have spec bikes, but there no way they'll all be tuned identically, all have the exact same lubrication in all the bearings, all have the exact chain tension, all have the axles torqued identically. All the derailers built exactly the same... One bike will get inevitably have an advantage over the others.
Why? The whole point is to standardise, I thought? They are already _not_ accommodating preferences for eg recumbent bikes. So what measure are a few more preferences not accommodated?
In any case, you can make a bunch of different official sizes.
No, the main point (as already explained by someone above) is that this competition is about the cyclists, not equipment. The idea is quite simple, but leads to complex, sometimes somewhat arbitrary rules, but they in the end work quite well to regulate the competition.
No offense, but you're clearly someone who doesn't know much about cycling, but are insisting that the cyclists (competition organizers) are "doing it wrong". Arguing with that is tiring, so I won't continue here.
I genuinely see the point you're trying to make, but fitting a bicycle is like fitting an article of clothing. It's is laughable to suggest clothing be one-size-fits-all the same way it is for bicycle geometries. It doesn't compare.
> There is also space for different competitions about technology (in motorsport, formula 1 has both a driver championship and a constructor championship which is about the technology).
And even then the technology is severely curtailed, it has to compete within a fairly restrictive design envelope.
Of course you are. If you’re against any rule you personally dislike or misunderstand you’re not for rules.
> What irks me a bit is that they are supposed to be about bikes
See that’s your problem: you completely missed what the competition was about.
The competition is no more about bicycles than an archery competitions is about bows and arrows.
The competition is about the athletes, the gear is only the means through which it happens. That’s why the name on the podium is that of the cyclist, not of the bike manufacturer.
Viewers are turned off if one of the competitors is seen to be winning simply due to having a better bike. The main characters in the show are the riders, not the bike builders.
Which viewers are those? Pro cycling fans are interested in bike manufacturers and technology, as well as in the riders. Gaining advantages through having better bikes (within reason) is a key part of the sport and part of what makes it fun to watch.
Even if recumbent bikes were not forbidden, no one would use them. Cycling is a sport of dignity. See also, underhanded free throws in basketball, which are strictly superior to the usual free throw style, but lack dignity and are embarrassing to perform so no one does them.
Hide it under one of the screws? Though surely one could develop a nozzle apparatus that would fill the pipe with gas and then weld the hole shut.
Anyway, GP is onto something interesting here. I'd watch the hell out of a sport based on creative attempts to overcome the rules and hide it from the judges.
> I'd watch the hell out of a sport based on creative attempts to overcome the rules and hide it from the judges.
NASCAR. This sport is all about bending the rules, gray areas and just plain trying to cheat. Back in the old days they would fill the roll cages will ball bearings during inspections, then pull a plug and drain them out before the race. The jack men, used to strategically dent the side of the car to strategically steer the air to get better downforce.
Matthew Carter (ex-team principal of the latter-day Lotus F1 team) has an anecdote that the team had a wing component that held the wing in a legal configuration, but was designed to break under racing forces. When it (inevitably) broke, it allowed the wing to flex into an illegal (but more performant) configuration. Since F1 has a rule that allows exceptions to illegal car configurations if they are due to damage, they were able to pass inspections by saying that the illegal configuration was due to the (intentional) damage.
there was a recent thing where Joey Logano was penalized for driving with a webbed glove. He'd hold it over a gap in the window (open but with a safety net over it) to reduce drag. Lots of drivers use their hand to do that, but the gloves can't have extra webbing. It's kind of shocking how much that matters for drag.
Another Yunick improvisation was getting around the regulations specifying a maximum size for the fuel tank by using 11-foot (3 meter) coils of 2-inch (5-centimeter) diameter tubing for the fuel line to add about 5 US gallons (18.9 liters) to the car's fuel capacity.
There was a version of denting the side recently where they were pulling out a corner near the outside back wheel for an aero advantage. I think they banned that pretty quickly because it was tearing up tires way more often.
Back during the Wild West of Group B rally, some teams (I forget which), ran their cars with cardboard tubes in place of roll cages! Perhaps an apocryphal story but those times were nuts.
I wasn’t being negative! I genuinely would love to see the ingenuity involved with trying to get something over like this on people really looking for it.
Well with the gas turbine you’re still in the same boat as having an inspectable device on the bike after the race though I guess it won’t set off any magnetic field detectors.
why not bypass the bike completely? Thin flexible solar panel - disguised as some hologram-like corporate sponsor logo or even under the shirt with the shirt somewhat transparent or the panel weaved into the shirt - on the back of the cyclist as a source of energy which is fed as electric impulses straight into the cyclist muscles, pacemaker on steroids so to say. This can also be done in the other sports - like long distance runners for example. Another use of the energy, instead of into the muscles, is to generate some wave like vibrations of the shirt and the pants, like dolphin skin does, to decrease the air friction.
Like a pacemaker the external impulse is to help jerk the muscle as the tiredness sets in, not to directly provide energy. For direct energy consumption one can for example implant into legs small - just for several Newtons of force - electrically contracting kind of artificial tendon/muscle.
The brilliance of cycling is that if you were to invent a cheating competition, you could never call it that because it would give away the game. You would need a pretext for rules, one that used some arbitrary but very specific set of contraints that disqualify all functionally efficient solutions outside their domain. They would enable byzantine regulations that created jobs for (pliable) authorities who outnumbered athletes, and be a constant source of subtext, scandal, misdirection, and betrayal.
To appreciate the peculiar beauty of cycling you need to understand what it is. It is not merely a sport or an athletic competition, it is itself the art of cheating.
> To appreciate the peculiar beauty of cycling you need to understand what it is.
In the middle of nowhere, festoons are hanging over the streets of a small village. It's a long forgotten village, except for today, when for around 10 seconds, it becomes the stage of a show in which the nation's biggest hero's and antihero's participate.
The noise of the television helicopter coming closer is the sign for the butcher and the baker and their customers to leave their shops and head for the street. Here they line up next to the village's grandads and grandmothers, who are firmly holding the hands of their grandkids, equally excited, eagerly awaiting the caravane of sponsor cars and police bikes that signal the head of the race.
There is nothing quite like the vivid brush of colors of the jerseys of a peloton rustling by at 60 km/hour. The whoosh of two hundred times two 25mm rubber tubes rolling over asfalt, a peloton displacing itself through air as one giant organism, the sound of shifting gears, the shriek of someone hitting the brakes, a shout perhaps to warn for a pothole or the odd street furniture. A sunray hitting the large sunglasses covering most of the faces of the riders, the rest of which give away a familiar mix of concentration and nervousness. The same questions racing through the minds of all the riders. "Did I train enough?" "How much will I be able to suffer today?"
Vamos!! Alé alé! Cries from the spectators at the side of the road, transcending any language, the grandma and the grandkid equally loud. Support, not for a particular team, less for a particular rider. Encouragement that is as much destined for the champion, feeling the pressure, chasing a new record, as for the anonymous rider who tries to make him or herself believe that if everything falls into place, it is possible for him or her to sneak away and grab an upset victory. It has happened.
A rider at the back of the bunch, looking for distraction, his legs hurting more than they ought to, spots a kid at the side of the road and throws his bottle at her feet. Rare will be the moments in her life that she will feel equally much at the center of the world.
Ah, the beauty of cycling. Maybe I misunderstand what it really is.
beautiful indeed. I loved the Tour for many years and rode in group rides. my favorite parts were the team time trial and the breakaway of the sprinters from the rest of the peloton. Armstrong's cheating itself wasn't so much the issue that took the romance away from it, but the pathetic way he conducted himself afterwards. Seeking redemption was so american and overbearing, and somehow he even managed to make cancer seem cloying, it tainted the ambiguity of the sport more than every other perennial doping scandal. It was too much to shrug off.
When I think about "cheating taken to an artistic level," Baseball is the sport that comes to mind first. Drugs, tampering with the ball, tampering with the bat, sign stealing, and so on.
Baseball is also rife with gamesmanship. stuff that feels like it could be cheating, but isn't - or, stuff that's cheating, but mostly unenforced. There's too much to be worth talking about here. Just read [1] instead.
It makes sense that Baseball would be this way. It's stochastic. The outcome of one pitch has no innate correlation with the outcome of the next. There's relatively little causality in Baseball, and when everyone is a pro, it's hard to rely on talent alone. Some might even say it's a fool's errand.
> In another incident, Yunick showed up for a race with stock fender wells still installed on his Chevelle, even though the rules stated they could be removed. After the car qualified well due to improved aerodynamics, fellow competitors complained. Yunick replied, "The rules say you MAY remove them. They don't say you HAVE to." After qualifying, Yunick promptly cut out the fender wells. After further complaints to NASCAR, Smokey said, "The rules don't say WHEN I can remove them."
Motor racing has the best opportunities for cheating by engineering and almost cheating by creatively interpreting the rules. My favorite two cheats are the NASCAR that shed weight in the form of ball bearings when lapping, and Toyota's air restrictor that opened up when installed that got them banned from rally racing.
The ball bearing thing is especially brilliant because they were released from the jacking points where NASCAR inspectors lifted the cars. The one point under the car they couldn't inspect.
I don't understand enough about cars to see what is special about this. Do the stock fender wells help and that's why it was better for him to keep them when nobody else did? And if so why did he remove them later to be like everyone else? What am I missing?
If the advantage is aerodynamic he should've kept them the whole time. If the point was to lose weight for the race, I don't get why doing it in qualification. Can someone explain?
Not sure of the specifics. The point is he did something different that appears to have been advantageous. His competitors read the rules differently or didn’t think to try.
If I had to guess taking the fender liners out could help cool the brakes. Qualifying is short so the heat buildup isn’t as important as in a full race.
NASCAR racers have also been known to blatantly cheat in one area to deliberately get caught and draw the attention away from additional cheats. The inspectors find one thing, flag it, then pass the car when it is fixed, leaving the bigger cheat undiscovered.
If you’re taking a car over the pits (rectifying a defect notice - not sure how universal this term is?) you leave a blown tail lamp or something so they have something easy to find. Then they don’t try too hard and find something expensive that needs rectifying. When you come back they only check the tail lamp noted earlier.
Interesting. Your link mentions the wheel arches, not the fender wells mentioned in wikipedia. Definitely sounds like the same story otherwise. Your link is from 2006, the wiki article references a book. I wonder which is right.
This is one of the things I like about F1. Everybody plays the game and everybody knows everybody plays the game, even the fans (one with brains anyway). There's this sort of "Oooh clever one dear adversary, let me copy that/make a complaint" energy because everyone recognizes that the goal isn't to race within the rules, it's to find what the rules don't cover and race there.
Do not forget all amazing discoveries made by cycling's so called cheaters. Where would the Furies, Joshuas and, dare I say it, Usyks be today if it weren't for Armstrong's pioneering work on blood doping in the 90's?
I would say that this one of the greatest casualties in the war on doping, Dr Ferrari especially has amassed a wealth of knowledge on blood and human energy systems that will never be acknowledged.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michele_Ferrari
While you can argue that amateur sports competitions promote healthy lifestyle and whatnot, professional sports is already a caricature of that. I don't see any reason not to organize "Olympics of doping" where rules allow participants to virtually do whatever they want in order to win.
When the effort itself loses meaning and cheaters take over, sport/activity receives 0 of my attention since it moves into pathetic amoral category, with little hope for improvement. It doesn't matter whether I do it or not.
One of benefits in my beloved climbing, alpinism, paragliding etc. - even top people there struggle to have good living and thus pros and amateurs alike are in for the actual sport, not chasing sponsors, getting an edge above the rest at all costs. Something about morality, fair game etc. Call me old fashioned if you want, I'll gladly wear that badge with honor (also a word very much applicable in these scenarios).
The olympics don't really set the protocol for any of this. the rules and procedures for each sport are set by their respective international sport organization. for cycling that's the UCI.
the olympics is only one event, and only happens once every four years. the rest of the season, that happens every year, is much more important and doesn't have an olympic host to provide bikes. so there needs to be some procedure that catches motor doping at all the races, not just one infrequent race. The olympics is just going to follow the same procedures that are used for all the rest of the worldtour level races. and while the olympics might not care about keeping the rider's bike sponsors happy, the rest of the races do.
if riders weren't out there promoting bike brands and riding bikes provided by their sponsors, pro bike racing wouldn't be a thing.
> promoting bike brands and riding bikes provided by their sponsors
Therein lies an answer - change the disincentives - instead of banning cheating riders, ban all of the sponsors of those riders for a time. Now the onus is on the sponsors to discourage cheating.
The sponsors aren't partners who are tuning up the bikes. It's companies who cut a cheque and expect logos everywhere.
Individual riders/teams are motivated to win and get sponsor dollars, so may resort to cheating. They know they will lose sponsors forever and be banned if caught, so they try to hide it from sponsors and officials. Basically: the same disincentives exist today. They just need to catch folks. It's just doping v2.
Surely this just moves the incentive from the sportsperson/team to the sponsor - who have significantly deeper financial resources to undermine WADA's testing regimes.
WADA's budget is something like $50m. The likes of Ineos & Red Bull have sports marketing budgets well into the billions.
Seems like they would have a lot more to lose as well. A scheme where Red Bull is helping athletes cheat is front page news. It would be catastrophic to their reputation. Much bigger deal than the athlete themselves getting caught.
The sponsor isn't punished when their reputation gets associated with a cheat? US Postal sued Armstrong for $100M (settled for $5M) after he got caught. Guilty by association with a PED athlete is the dominant economic risk of sports sponsoring. At least in sports that have dropped the "just pretend we did not notice" attitude that's still going strong in e.g. football (both of them, I suppose)
I mean we are talking of an overrated "energy drink" that no one actually needs to consume but yet manages to sell billions of dollars worth of every year.
I don't think their target market is that susceptible to reason.
It is important to separate the teams vs. the company itself. The Ineos cycling team has a total budget closer to $50M. That's the budget to support 20+ riders and all the support staff.
You wouldn’t ban a sponsor, but a team. People typically refer to a cycling team by a sponsor’s name, but teams can (and do) change sponsors from season to season (or sometimes even within a season like “Jumbo Visma” -> “Visma Lease a Bike” did this year between the Giro and the Tour).
Jumbo Visma is the same team as Visma Lease a Bike. They have the same riders, managers, athletic director, staff, etc. Just a different name on the jersey.
As for how a team is banned: you simply ban them. In most of cycling you need to be a member of a team (professional) or club (amateur) to even enter a race. Your racing license will name your team/club. If your team is banned you may not register for the race.
Also, at the World Tour professional level, your team would have several cars driving within the race to support riders with food, bottles, and mechanical assistance. Since the race will be on a closed course, only official vehicles can drive with the riders. Even if started the race, you would be at a serious disadvantage to race with no team support.
(Just an aside, doesn't invalidate any of your reasoning)
The name change from Jumbo Visma to Visma | Lease a Bike didn't happen between the Giro and the Tour, it was a lot earlier. I would say, but I'm not 100% certain of this, that the name change happened between the 2023 and 2024 seasons. I think teams have to register their name with the UCI, and can't change it during the season.
For example here is a photo of Jan Tratnik finishing first in Omloop Het Nieuwsblad on 2024-02-24, long beclearly wearing a Visma | Lease a Bike shirt.
The team did change the design of the shirts before the Tour, because their old shirts had a lot of yellow which conflicts with the yellow jersey of the GC leader. Maybe that's what you were thinking of?
Tons of teams are still run by folks who were heavily involved in the 1990s and 2000s doping scandals. They all claim they're all clean and reformed but most of them were never really punished.
Maybe it's a bit circular but the organizers could disqualify the racers being sponsored which would mean either the banned sponsor doesn't sponsor anyone or it's done under wraps. The latter would defeat the advertising purpose the sponsor would have for the sponsorship.
“Red Bull caught cheating at $event in sprawling plot; banned for 6 years” - they might invest some dollars to avoid such a disaster. According to the quote in the article, curbing this is only a matter of will and $$$.
Of course it's a matter of $$$. Sports doesn't actually make anything. It's entertainment that's paid for via ads. But that's also why hitting the sponsors wouldn't work, because without them the (professional) sport might not survive.
It's definitely possible, it just means the professional level of the sport can't be funded mostly from the amateur level of the sport.
cycling is getting there, a lot of the big teams have petrostates or oil companies as sponsors now, but the bike brands are still too important to cut out.
I myself have sailed several of them. Currently the laser. Previously the 49er and 470. There's actually lots of great second hand boats because of the competitors selling them after 1-2 seasons.
The race organizers actually don't care about the bikes or sponsors the same way. The race organizers (at the world tour level) have a solid income stream. The biggest races are bigger than the World Tour and are older, and will still be around when the current World Tour setup folds.
It is the teams that are begging for money, all the teams need sponsorships for bikes and everything else. Teams in cycling have no home stadium and have no place they own and can sell tickets. They aren't in control of TV rights or anything like that for races that are big enough to be televised.
It's one of the unique things in cycling. Even at the grassroots levels clubs were often volunteer but race organizers might have been or are for-profit. Even at the grassroots level the organizer charges entry fees.
Alternatively it would be interesting to have a race or series of races where it's anything goes, including drugging. It's already such a cat and mouse game so why not just embrace it.
This would just mean the teams with the biggest budgets win. Doping is expensive.
Not to mention, every person responds differently to doping protocols.
What if you're a C rider who becomes an A+ rider when doped? And you race against a B+ rider who becomes an A minus rider when doped. Still not an even playing field.
This is effectively what lance did. He had record levels of hematocrit naturally, and an extremely high vo2. It meant he had a magnified sensitivity to doping protocols that the other riders didn't. So his doping advantage actually increased his relative abilities even -higher- than his also-doped competitors.
Not to mention kids coming into the sport. Would be a massive mountain to climb to go from a prodigy 16 year old against doped pros.
And even that still wasn’t “no holds barred”, leaving aside what little safety rules it had (and how weakly enforced they were) Group B did have rules on minimum weight and displacement classes (with negative offsets for turbo and super charging).
There are high level competitive sports leagues that effectively allow doping. Pro bodybuilding is probably the most obvious. There are tested federations, but they're virtually ignored because the guys competing are half the size of the guys doing drugs. Powerlifting also has untested federations, and strongman I think might do token testing just to appease law enforcement since you can't openly allow something that is illegal is most jurisdictions, but it's designed to be easy to beat and everyone is well aware that the top competitors are not only using drugs but have to use drugs to do what they're doing.
Notably, this is probably part of why the Olympics doesn't have bodybuilding, powerlifting, or strongman on the program, as sports need to have a WADA-approved antidoping program to qualify.
Also, the Olympics itself from the 50s to the 80s basically was what you're asking for. This is the time between when synthetic steroids were first widely available and when tests for them became possible. In the meantime, with no way to catch anyone, it was anything goes. I wouldn't say that led to pretty outcomes. Records that stood for 40 years, sure, but eastern bloc nations with mandatory athletics camps were injecting 12 year-old girls with testosterone and telling them it was vitamins. At a reasonable dose, most performance enhancing drugs are fairly safe for men but virtually none of them are safe for women because of the masculinizing effects. The changes to a female body are permanent.
beacuse what will really happen is, some nation desperate to make a statement on the world stage will take a thousand small children and force feed them drugs to make 10 athletes
100 die of the drugs during childhood
700 suffer the rest of their shortened lives from consequential medical issues
perhaps its easier to just throw the 'failed' 990 into a meat grinder to ensure there is no controversy later
but sure, its fun to watch the 10 athletes at the peak of their game!
Different riders have different preferences, and there's a lot of money and technology that goes into improving the bikes every year (or at least every decade). The materials, the construction, the electronics, the aerodynamics, the fit, the saddle, the tires... they're all constantly evolving. It's like car races, manufacturer sponsorship is a huge part of it, and the races in turn advertise those bikes.
Would it make for more equal footing if everyone had the same model? Yeah, probably, but does that happen elsewhere in the Olympics? Does the host supply skis, shoes, bows, bobsleds, etc.?
To me, the olympics are about determining who is best at a sport. It's not a technical problem like a car race where bending the rules with creative engineering is expected and encouraged.
The trouble is that people have different preferences for different equipment and by mandating one particular bike, you disadvantage a lot people based on who does better on a particular bike and aren't judging people solely based on who is the better cyclist. Consider the absurd extension of using exactly the same equipment where even the size of the bike is exactly the same, saddle height is the same, pedal length is the same, etc. There will be maybe one person who that is ideal with and whole lot more people suffering injuries from riding incorrectly sized bikes.
Therefore, since we can't all have exactly the same bikes, we need to come up with a definition of what is "fair" to adjust for the bike that someone races on. Sure, this allows for some degree creative engineering, but is that really a bad thing so long as money doesn't become the determining factor of who wins? It pushes the science of bikes forward and eventually that new tech will make its way to everyone, including amateur cyclists.
> The trouble is that people have different preferences for different equipment and by mandating one particular bike, you disadvantage a lot people based on who does better on a particular bike
This is not backed by fact.
Most world tour riders have very little choice on their equipment, nor do they choose the team sponsors. They have some leeway on a few third party components of their choice and can usually which frame model they use among a tiny selection of less than 3 models but that doesn't change drastically how the bike ride really as long as the bike fits. You could totally make a race where everybody ride the same kind of bike, and riders would be able to choose the frame size, saddle, stem and handlebar size, and possibly clipless pedal models that would make everything more standard.
Actually in Japan they do something similar in keiring. All frames are built with steel tubes, they use old styles of pedals with clips, and only parts stamped by NJS, following design and construction principles of track bikes of the late 70's, are approved. Sometimes regular olympic track racers spend a few months in Japan in the off season to get some additional money, they swap their high end carbon bikes prototypes to what looks like vintage track bikes of the 70's, you can actually see the bikes bending under load, yet the best riders with the best strategy of the day still win.
3 models and a bunch of sizes as well. The Giant Propel Advanced SL 0 has 6 different size options. Even for cheap bikes, it’s common to have a small, medium, and large frame size.
As far as restricting technology, stopping at 70s tech seems really arbitrary. There are already rules and regulations for what you can use.
One final note: I’m pretty sure UCI would get a big lawsuit if they mandated one bike from a particular manufacturer due to antitrust concerns.
> One final note: I’m pretty sure UCI would get a big lawsuit if they mandated one bike from a particular manufacturer due to antitrust concerns.
I don't think so. It happens all the time in lower series of Motorsport and even the highest for tires. Formula 1 and Motogp are working respectively with Pirelli and Michelin if my memory is correct.
For esport world championship the UCI used Zwift in the early years and now it is their competitor MyWhoosh.
The keirin regulation using 70's tech was just an example to illustrate that controlling specs is possible. Same could be done but with a single make of bikes and just various frame sizes available for world tour. The issue is mostly that team would lose sponsorship so nobody has anything to gain. In the grand scheme of things, the difference between pro bikes is rather marginal and doesn't decide the outcome of the races.
Engineering is part of many sports, skiing, snowboarding, swimming (albeit limited after those floating suits), running. Even if you say they should all be about the sports performance only, there's engineering behind training schedules, equipment, diet, techniques & posture, etc.
It's not actually, though. For the majority of these sports, the professional leagues often have superior competition and performances than you see in the Olympics, with the notable exception being many of the individual sports where there isn't enough global interest to drive commercial organization outside the Olympics.
For example, the quality of basketball, soccer, and baseball you find in the pro leagues is all MUCH better than in the Olympics. Track & Field has a regular annual season that's already international (Diamond League), plus many standing invitationals, any of which are as likely to see records broken as the Olympics.
Diamond league may be more likely to see records broken, frankly, because it allows pace setters and the light indicators on the infield rail telling the runners exactly where the world record pace is at. But most athletes don't compete in every meet, so the field isn't usually as competitive, and nobody plans a four-year training peak around a diamond league meet, so maybe that makes up for it.
Yes, but where equipment is involved it's often very personal. In tennis a top professional can't just switch rackets, for example. Even I have problems playing with other people's rackets.
Is it that black-and-white? Many sports are a mix of athlete ability and equipment (alongside other variables like training, diet, etc.). Everything from running shoes to swimsuits to climbing shoes are engineered to heck and back, and the training regimes etc. are also super-scienced.
It's not like we just have naked people wrestling each other these days. The equipment is a part of the package now.
In your view, are activities like cycling and snowboarding valid as Olympic sports? Neither could exist without a significant amount of creative engineering.
“Equipment shall be of a type that is sold for use by anyone practicing cycling as a sport.
Any equipment in development phase and not yet available for sale (prototype) must be subject of an authorization request to the UCI Equipment Unit before its use. Authorization will be granted only for equipment which is in the final stage of development and for which commercialization will take place no later than 12 months after the first use in competition. The manufacturer may request a single prolongation of the prototype status if justified by relevant reasons”
So, that gives manufacturers an incentive to innovate, but won’t give teams an advantage for long.
Famously difficult to draw a satisfying line between these two things. The history of every sport is a conflict about exactly this, entire modern sports are the relics of people being unsatisfied with how the line was drawn at one particular time.
I'm not saying it's not a good goal to have, just you kind of have to view it as an inherently unsolvable problem to get anything productive out of it.
Yeah, probably, but does that happen elsewhere in the Olympics?
Yes, sailing. I believe all but Formula Kite are one-design classes (Laser, Laser Radial, IQFoil, Nacra 17, 49er, and 470). A few have options between licensed manufacturer (but to same spec) and a few are true one-make (Laser, Laser Radial), not sure about the others.
As someone else pointed out in another thread: for any given sport the olympics is just one competition. For it to remain prestigious it needs to have most of the best competitors in each sport competing in it, and for that it needs to stay fairly close to the mainstream format and constraints of each sport.
Single-design classes are standard in sailing, so the olympics uses them also. They are not standard for cycling, and it would be a huge deviation from conventions of competitive cycling for the olympics to demand them.
That doesn't mean they can't or that it wouldn't possibly be worth while. But there are huge costs to doing that, like possibly few or none of the major competitive cyclists competing.
100% agree. Just a literal answer the the question.
I’d love to see track cycling get more standard equipment. As it is today, some nations pump a ton of money into aerodynamics and RR to substantial advantage. More so than the difference between a Cannondale or Specialized road bike. Or so it seems to me.
And to put a point on this, the top professional road cycling teams in the world only have annual budgets of about $50m (covering 30 cyclists, all the coaches and directors, mechanics and any other crew they may need - physical therapists, chef, etc). Barely the top ten of the top road cyclists earn >$1m/yr. Compare that to mainstream sports that might have a just salary cap of $250m/yr.
> They are not standard for cycling, and it would be a huge deviation from conventions of competitive cycling for the olympics to demand them.
The Olympics (or, perhaps more generally, national team cycling events) _do_ make a huge deviation from the conventions of competitive cycling already: no team radios. One of the reasons they are so fun to watch :-)
That is indeed an exception, but IIRC it's not the only event with that exception: I think the world, continental and national championships also don't allow team radios.
Another exception is that the Olympics and world and continental championships are ridden with national teams instead of the various commercial teams. That makes quite a difference too.
Everything about the equipment has been a charade for many decades.
All the real improvements in bikes have been banned for a very long time and pro racing is used these days to sell all kinds of things which have been sideways moves at best.
I'm not an expert here, but a lot of aerodynamic improvements were banned, and disc brakes were banned until they weren't. At an extreme, recumbents. Triathalon handlebars in mass-start stages. There are minimum weights.
In track racing, the bikes are required to have fixed gearing.
The earliest Tour of France required riders to be self supporting, meaning they had to carry their own spare tires etc.
One thing I've observed is that for us commuters (me too), bikes are no longer tied to racing. We can have anything we want. The ubiquitous "hybrid" is used in no racing discipline, and the classic mountain bikes that are favored by many computers are largely obsolete for competitive mountain biking.
A big part (possibly the primary reason) is to promote and sell overpriced gear to amateurs. The Little 500 race is run with all riders using standard bikes, so it's not unprecedented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_500
Kinda quietly making fun of folks who show up on (e.g.) $10,000 road bikes and then get dropped 5 miles into the ride is a whole Thing.
True life, I'm not sure there's a good reason for a person spending their own money to buy a new road bike that costs more than $4-5K new. You can absolutely get started for way way less (probably $1500 new retail), but once the hook sets and you decide This Is Something I Like, there are things you'll want.
Carbon frames are far more comfortable to ride than aluminum. This extends to handlebars, stem, and seatpost.
Lighter-weight wheels -- also carbon -- are an upgrade you can feel IMMEDIATELY. I think it has to do with rotational weight vs. static weight. Nicer wheels have nicer bearings in them, too.
Electronic shifting doesn't make you faster in and of itself, but once you've used it you'll fall in love with it. Shifting is effortless, and combined brake-and-shift actions become viable in a way they aren't with mechanical shifting.
My Giant was just under $5k, and that's after an upgrade or two (mostly the addition of a power meter). Do I ride with folks on $10-15k bikes? Oh yeah. MOST of them are pretty serious riders, but they're not any faster on that Pinarello than they would be on (e.g.) my bike. It's effectively jewelry at that point.
(Now, the exception is if you're shaped in a way that makes off-the-shelf frames difficult. I know a couple folks -- one very well off and very short, the other decidedly middle class and VERY tall -- who got fully custom frames, but for both of them it was really the only way to get a bike that fit. For the middle-class guy, this means his bike is worth more than his car, but it's a forever-bike (titanium frame), and he's an 8-10,000 mile a year guy, so...)
They basically already did, forced the bikes to be heavier than 6.9 kg, killed almost all design innovation that didn't results in 2 triangles on the frame, etc.
Everyone is essentially riding very expensive version of the same bike. 90% of riders will be on Dura Ace and equipment that the biggest distinguishing qualities are paint and size.
You're reasonably close to right: 18 of 22 teams ran Dura-Ace, which surprises me because in my enthusiast circles locally the split with Shimano and SRAM is much, much more even. (I personally prefer the latter.)
What REALLY shocked me is this:
"2024 marks the first year that the Tour de France has been without a team using a Campagnolo groupset. This means that it was a two-horse race between Shimano and SRAM for stage honours."
I mean, I know Campy wasn't what it had been. I only know a few folks who run Campy groups, and I don't know anyone who uses the Campy electronic groupset. It's all so expensive, and most shops don't have someone with any experience with their gear anymore, which becomes a death spiral for people who buy their own gear. Still, the idea that the only Euro maker got shut out of even participating in the Tour is amazing to me.
SRAM decided to do something clever : instead of giving money to pro-riders to promote their products and hope regular people will be convinced to buy the products ; they invested in partnership with bike manufacturers, since most groupsets are sold already assembled to a frame.
More and more new bakes are sold with SRAM components than it used to be.
So people have now more opportunities to pay for SRAM products on a new bike, and afterwards buy replacement parts when required.
Also, for each given price category, SRAM is usually a bit cheaper than Shim.
Meanwhile Campagnolo is more and more expensive while offering nothing more than the two others. Also less partnerships with bike manufacturers, even Italian ones.
And some Asian brands are starting to be more and more reliable.
Every rider IS effectively on the same bike. They're either running Shimano drivetrains, or SRAM. I don't imagine the Olympics could spend the millions in R&D to invent their own drivetrain system for a once-every-four-years event.
If you were referring to the bike frame itself, it's kind of the least-important part of the bike.
That's some Team Sky logic ;) It doesn't matter when you have to ride your sponsor's bike.
Example: Pogacar's Colnago is decidedly not aero; Cavendish's Wilier ain't the best sprinter bike.
But they're all competitive, because like I said, the role the frame plays in the overall "system" is negligible. It's marketing. The aero gains on the new Madone are entirely in the handlebar, and are erased if you add a rider to the bike.
Bikes are sized to the individual rider, even at amateur levels. You can't give a bike designed for a 5'4" guy to a 6'4" guy or vice versa, they physically won't be able to use it. Proportions makes this even worse: the cycling equivalent of Michael Phelps won't be able to use a bike designed for a normally-proportioned person.
Because not all have the same size and some like diffrent handles, seats and so on. For racing bicycles are already a lot rules in place. Shape, geometery, weight. That's why some fancy by bicyles are ok for Triatlon but not for bicycle races.
There are certain motor racing categories where things like engines (or even entire cars) are provided by the race organiser and teams are not allowed to make any modifications. Formula A1 comes to mind as an example.
These categories are much more focussed on the driver, as the racetrack and cars are all identical.
I'm pretty sure that something like this can be brought into cycle racing. Everybody gets the same frame, wheelset, crankset and groupset, and you install your own cockpit (saddle and handlebars).
F1 Cars are completely custom built by the team, and even different drivers within the same team drive essentially different cars. The suspension setup, handling profile, seat, steering wheel and button layout are all custom done for the driver.
Because the most likely doping they still use is self blood-infusions, as described by Infuentes recently. Not detectable.
And those incredible new records by the top riders can only be explained by doping. Faster than with EPO.
Mechanical doping is still an additional possibility, sure. Esp. after several riders complained about those motor noises last year.
Self-transfusion can be detectable now that they have the athlete biological passport. At least, that's the intent of it. If your red blood cell count goes up faster than is naturally possible, they'll be able to tell. This can't keep you from doing it very gradually, of course. Plus, basically all of these guys sleep in altitude tents now to boost red blood cell production via low oxygen. I don't think anyone has been caught doing it yet, but it's also possible now to use a carbon monoxide inhaler to induce hypoxia and boost red blood cell production that way. Escape Collective did an investigation into a few months ago. That is pretty dangerous, but it's hard to believe not a single person would at least try, and it can't be detected. It's not even actually banned right now, though UCI did ban huffing xenon gas to do the same thing. Detecting carbon monoxide huffing seems undetectable even in principle, though, since it's a naturally occurring pollutant. You'd effectively be banning riders from ever smoking since that would produce a positive test.
Escape Collective did an article on this (https://escapecollective.com/what-would-happen-if-everyone-i...), and while at first glance there's a lot to like about a "spec series" for cycling, ultimately it would definitely advantage/disadvantage some riders. Plus, people just want to race a bike that works for them, not some spec bike.
One downside is that if (when) the equipment fails, it'll be unfair to whoever happened to be lumped with the bad one and it would sometimes be hard to prove if it was the equipment's fault or the athlete's. With their own bike, it's their own responsibility.
Another is there would be no pressure on the bike technology so the audience would know they're not performing as well as they could on some consumer bike, reducing the appeal of it. It's already stink that there are weight minimums.
doesn't really seem fair to me if you've practiced on what you own and perhaps have made it custom to fit to your limb/torso ratios for posture, have a handlebar grip you like, prefer the kind of derailleur and shifters you chose etc
its all a matter of equipment preference and for sports that involve using equipment i think that would be a personal choice of minor optimizations and preferences that you should be granted given you would have worked a lot with it to get to the olympics
There was a controversy in curling a few years ago where some curling teams were using new brooms by a new company that had significantly better tech. It was so good it made it unnecessary to have two sweepers. The resolution was to ban it and only allow brooms from certain manufacturers.
It seems reasonable that these sports could narrow down the list of approved equipment down to a few approved suppliers every year.
Shoes had a similar issue when Nike released their first modern super-shoe (Vaporfly, IIRC). The track and field body had to limit shoe sole height and the other brands had a lot of catch-up to do.
Same for swimming with high tech, low drag, bouyant swimsuits. Again, the international body had to step in and ban some materials/designs to prevent domination by nations that could sink resources into the engineering.
same thing happens in cycling all the time too. the UCI bans new equipment all the time, and the rules for what is allowed are very strict, to the point where there's a limit on sock height. there is a limited list of frames that can be used in UCI races, including the olympics
but rules around the type of equipment you can use, and the race host supplying specific equipment to all riders, is a very different thing.
Did you know that the Olympics used to be a strictly amateur competition? You would get disqualified if it turned out you'd taken payment for your sporting activity.
The idea is that different equipment is better suited for different individuals. By mandating a specific kind of equipment for all athletes, you'd be benefiting some individuals over others.
For example, road bikes have different frame shapes that are suitable depending on your torso length compared to leg length.
Of course, the natural next step would be allow some flexibility (different frame size but same material), but you can see how that could be a slippery slope of legislation and lobbying that would end up in a similar situation to where we are today?
You -should- be able to just mandate Hubs and cranks to get around this.
Or make sponsors provide a 'slew' of wheels and cranksets for all their riders (i.e. spares as well) that can get inspected before the race, and are randomly distributed between the riders sponsored.
Buuuuut UCI hasn't even figured out doping, so lol
Suggesting everyone should have to use a specific bike is exactly a suggestion like that - bikes have sizes and shapes that are suited to riders of particular body sizes and shapes.
Especially in the context of the original olympics, which were largely conducted nude. The idea that a rich country can field better equipment is absurd.
Would you expand that to nutrition, training regime, traing location (altitude), etc?
Then limit the amount each country/athlete can spend, make everyone get paid the same by different sponsors?
I don't think the Olympics were ever about equal footing or decreasing variables. To really level the playing field you'd have to have a clone army of athletes with the same genes, diet, lifestyle, training, coach, sleep, etc. Equipment is just one variable among dozens, and eventually the rules can change to limit their contribution (like with swimsuits).
That's because in the sport of cycling, the bike is main part of the athlete and therefore sponsors want athlete's to ride the bikes they ride all throughout the rest of the year.
It's purely a branding and sponsorship related piece.
Does Spec Miata have a spectator following? I have always taken it to be an accessible form of motor racing in which to participate, not something to watch.
Maybe technically, but most families in the US live in suburbs which are classified as urban areas but are really not. The drive to the grocery store from an average suburban home is probably 10-20 minutes.
The original Olympics were competed in the nude. I'm not saying we need to go that far, but the Olympic committee has a standard pool for all the swimmers, and they could provide standard bikes for all the cyclists.
Another alternative would be if the transmission was provided by the officials and would be fitted to the bike and sealed before start but that could also spell problems.
In javelin and pole vaulting the athletes bring their own equipment. Has anyone ever cheated there? Interesting possibilities...
"User preference" does not need to be a part of the sport.
I'm sure some athletes would prefer a more ergonomic discus or shorter hurdles in track and field, maybe the gymnasts would like a slightly different geometry or spring characteristic for the bars or vault, but they don't get that choice.
I understand that people need differently sized bikes because they have different heights and slightly different ratios of leg/torso/arm lengths, but I can easily imagine having three or four standardized frames with adjustable seatposts, seat rails, and stem length, with a selection of various length stems and cranks. Just put the same wheels, the same mech, the same bars, and everything on every bike and see which rider is fastest. Call it an "Olympic bike".
This idea was already tried with the hour record. Between 1972 and 2014 a standard bike was used to match what Eddy Merckx used.
What happened was cyclists lost interest in the hour record because the bike became too dissimilar to the bikes they were riding professionally.
After a new rules for modern bikes were introduced for the hour record, interest was renewed in the discipline.
For something like the Olympics which is a one day road race or individual time trial, I think the current UCI rules for those bikes are fine. Everyone is on roughly competitive bikes. Marketing aside, I don’t think anyone really thinks the top Specialized bike is better than Canyon or Cervelo or Trek or whatever.
I don't think you understand cycling. Gear preference in cycling isn't the same as wanting to change the rules of track and field or gymnastics.
The Olympics are a one-off that happens infrequently, but still draws from the same set of world-class riders as the rest of the racing season (a season that happens ever year, and contains far more important events).
There's zero chance what you suggest will ever take root.
Not just that, but a lot of the money in cycling comes from bicycle (+bike component) manufacturers in the form of sponsorship and endorsements. Outside of a NASCAR-like pseudo-standardization, going to a standardized bike from one manufacturer for the highest-visibility events would throw that money out the window (and cause conflicts where the biggest riders are riding bikes from a different manufacturer than the one that funds the rest of their activities).
I understand that's the way it is, and I understand the power/money systems are set up in a way that no one realistically has the ability to make the change happen, but that's not intrinsic to the sport, it's just something that's grown up organically around it.
>> Gear preference in cycling isn't the same as wanting to change the rules of track and field or gymnastics.
Anectdotal evidence to support this.
Specialized had pretty high end helemets for cyclists, but for some reason, the Italian riders would also complain about them. They finally got some of the Tour riders together to try and figure out what they could to do solve this issue.
To me, it was pretty funny. They complained that the straps that came down on both sides would lay on their face and cause tan lines. I'm not kidding, this was a major issue and Specialized changed the straps so they were embedded in a way that hung off the riders face so it wouldn't cause tan lines.
You had to show people how cool it was, it was such a minor thing, but to these guys, it was a big enough problem they actually solved and then put into their high end helmets.
Helmet fit is also super tied to brand. I have tried and tried to find something that fits my head better than a Specialized helmet, but I haven't been able to do it. I mean, nothing against Specialized, but variety would be nice, and the model that works best for me from them is expensive.
Some brands fit, but not comfortably. Some brands (POC, for example), just don't fit my head at all.
It's pretty easy to find pix of 80s-era racers (e.g., LeMonde) who sported pretty intense glove tans -- pale hands, but with a circle tan on the back and tan fingers. Sharp lines on the upper arm and thigh from jerseys and shorts are still common, too, but I see less of all of this now than I did back then.
I ride a lot, and I barely have them, because sunscreen exists and I don't want cancer.
What’s incredible to me is the continued cries of innocence from the cyclists that have been flagged by these detection mechanisms. Just like Armstrong after he was accused of doping.
It takes a special kind of person to continue to proclaim their innocence so fervently even when presented with irrefutable proof that they’ve cheated.
> It takes a special kind of person to continue to proclaim their innocence so fervently even when presented with irrefutable proof that they’ve cheated.
Is it?
I'd say that everyone has the potential for this weird survivorship behavior where you can't admit the truth for yourself.
It's probably related to a deep rooted cognitive dissonance where it's less painful to keep maintaining your innocense than to admit the truth.
In the right environment (such as an ultra competitive one where your livelyhood is at stake) most people would rise to the occasion. Just as most people would be able to kill people in a war.
Not to defend their cheating, but when you saying "I cheated" ends your career and the career of everyone involved with you, it's easy to see why they may dig in. It's not some game for them, this is their livelihood.
Right, but wouldn't you be better off by admitting it, then making amends to address it? At least you will be seen as having some shred of integrity. You're banned from the sport for a period of time regardless. IMO continuing to deny the obvious is way worse than addressing it head on and moving forward.
>Right, but wouldn't you be better off by admitting it, then making amends to address it?
No? By denying it there's still a chance you'll get out of it, however tiny that chance is. That chance becomes zero when you admit it. A "shred of integrity" won't pay your trainers mortgage.
Are there any cases where someone was caught cheating and promptly copped to it? I guess it’s hard to tell if that’s never happened. I’m truly intrigued.
My guess would be that keeping up the public facade that you're not cheating requires a little "self-brainwashing" for lack of a better word, and that you don't get out of that mindset on a dime.
I remember the hullabaloo about the Femke Van den Driessche case; I'm shocked that the IEEE article's contention that the motor used there could produce 200W of power.
We talk about one's Functional Threshold Power, which is the amount of power you could produce for a solid hour and then be completely spent. There are a variety of ways to arrive at this number (ie, other than trying to do exactly that, which is fraught with peril b/c of pacing issues), but the metric is well respected and is used as the foundation of most cycling training plans.
So the wattage is one thing, but your weight is the other. Watts per kilo is the magic number, because obviously it takes more power to move 6'3" Wout Van Aert than it does to move 5'9" Tadej Pogacar. Big men make more power, but it takes more power to move them, so usually the winners look more like Pogi (or, in the case of this year's Tour de France, they look EXACTLY like Pogi, ha ha).
Anyway: 200W is a BIG number. A LOT has been made of Pogacar's performance this year, and it may be his output was the highest ever seen in the sport. Estimates places his FTP in the 7w/kg range, which is bananas.
Pogi weighs 66kg, that implies power of about 462W. He may well be the most elite, powerful guy to ever race, and a 200W motor would add 40% for HIM. Van den Driessche is not in his league; it's likely 200W would come close to doubling her FTP.
If you're going to cheat, you need to be subtle. 200W isn't subtle. 200W output also implies one HECK of a battery, which would be obvious when lifting the bike. Given that the bike in question was for cyclocross -- where competitors carry their bikes often as they cross obstacles -- I'm thinking that must be a mistake.
The article ALSO note that while the maker of the motor in question is out of business, you can also experience a 200W push with a bike from Lotus. However, if you click through, you find that Lotus is claiming the motor in the bike they're selling "weighs just 300 grams but packs a powerful 125W per kilogram." IOW, the assist motor puts out only 37W.
200W at 300g is realistic for a modern BLDC motor. The article states that Maxon was the motor supplier so they likely used the EC-4pole series, I'm guessing it's one of these.
It's 30mm diameter to fit in a down-tube, 200W, and 300g. But just because it's 200W doesn't mean you have to run it at maximum capacity, there's no reason you couldn't run it at 5-50W.
Under the rules, how different is that from something like just taking caffeine?
Doping is usually in reference to banned substances. But huffing CO genuinely seems completely out of left field of any rules that I know. They probably will ban it, but before they do is it correct to call it doping?
Every single world class athlete spends most of their waking hours coming up with the most clever "biological hacks" to give themselves an edge. Training regimens, diets, rest and recovery schedules, equipment, sports psychology support, etc. etc. all are optimized to the nth degree to give athletes an edge.
I think you are missing the point of pro cycling to be honest.
As other commenters have said, the very purpose of this all is to see who can cheat in a way that's not outright illegal.
We are at a point of such peak human performance and conditioning that if you bring in equalisers such as the same bike for everyone etc, you'll just have a whole peloton crossing the finish line at the same time.
That story is a nothing burger. CO rebreathing is the technique to monitor hemoglobin mass changes after a period at altitude. It's a test that lasts 3 minutes and has no consequence.
It's like saying "cyclist get better by drawing blood" when they just have their bloodwork done to see how they are doing with training.
Don't think you read the link. It talks about CO rebreathing as an analytics tool, and then specifically talks about a more aggressive method to increase performance:
> A second, more aggressive approach, which is called carbon monoxide inhalation and uses the same equipment and techniques, steps into the scientifically new and much riskier realm of inhaling the poisonous gas for the express purpose of performance enhancement. A growing body of recent scientific research suggests CO inhalation can have a powerful impact on measures of aerobic capacity like VO2max, or maximal oxygen uptake.
And the teams say that they only use it to analyze blood values during altitude adaptation. As the article mentions, the technique isn't new, so why imply that teams are using it for nefarious purposes?
> And there is no hard evidence that any WorldTeams are currently using CO inhalation for performance gains. But multiple sources for this article voiced concern that it might be imminent, and possibly already happening in cycling or other sports.
To go from that to "people dope now with CarbonMonoxide" is dishonest.
Every cyclist has a powermeter and the power is recorded. Why not require them to upload the power file directly after the race? Since they all ride the same course, you can correlate power output with speed (taking riders height and weight into ac ount) to spot outliers. I know there's drafting, differently aerodynamic bike setups and other factors to consider, but in principle I guess a sudden 20 watt external power gain could be detected that way.
I guess you wouldn't detect it. Elite cyclists can easily sustain 400-500 watts for many minutes, 20 watts is like 5% - a rounding error compared to variability of power input.
The issue with drafting would be that it comes and goes. In a sprint finish, one moment you might be drafting, another trying to overtake the other guy (so not drafting), then fall behind again and draft, all in a matter of seconds.
Then, there's the road gradient, also a massive impact on the power/speed function, and it's highly localized. You might know that a stretch of the road is 8% on average, over say 100m segments, but locally it can be much more or much less. On sharp switchback the inside of the corner can be 20+% when the outside is only 5-10%.
Plex it's a race, power goes up and down in response to events, one moment you're sitting in a group, another you're chasing the guy in front. Presumably that's also where you'd press the boost button - when you'd legitimately be putting down more power.
In amongst all that I doubt you would see an extra power boost.
I think the only reason that motor doping is pretty much non-existent today is really because that it's useless unless it's a flat sprint stage.
The battery and the motor would be significant weight to carry when it comes to the mountains, not to mention this deadweight must be carried all the way from start to finish and only be used for maybe 60 seconds.
> The battery and the motor would be significant weight to carry when it comes to the mountains, not to mention this deadweight must be carried all the way from start to finish and only be used for maybe 60 seconds.
Bikes have a minimum weight of 6.8 kg in UCI competitions and the lightest bikes are at least a kilogram lighter than the minimum, so they have to add weight anyway.
Pro bike weights are already often below UCI minima (6.8kg IIRC), and ballast is added to meet minimum weight requirement. So I guess this could replace some of the ballast.
Isn't the powermeter usually measuring tension forces on the pedal arms? So it won't measure the forces of a motor which is probably inside one of the bearings.
This seems hard to do in my opinion. There are a lot of hard to predict factors, like aerodynamics (riding behind another rider takes much less power) and wind. Also the speed and power measurements are usually not extremely precise. There is a few percent of tolerance in most standard equipment. Exact GPS speeds are really hard to measure during cornering or in areas with limited visibility to the sky.
So we need a power meter at the pedal and a power meter at the tire/road interface. And of course, you don't expect those values to agree due to mechanical inefficiency. Which means that even with that level of scrutiny, there's a few percentage points of overhead for your motor-dopers to play in.
The problem is that Olympians are kind of just by definition outliers. Is this competitor a cheater because he can sustain 20 watts higher than others for most of the race? Or is he just a physical outlier who made it to the Olympics because of his unusual power output?
This would theoretically detect the opposite. The power meter (on the crank arm) detects force applied on the pedal. The discrepancy would be if they're overtaking other racers pedalling the same wattage.
One can tamper with the data or the power meter itself. If a cheater is faster than a competitor pushing more watts, his team will respond with the usual BS: the bike's aerodynamics, stiffness and its super-innovative tires made him faster...
However, mandatory power recording could become quite valuable over the long run. The peloton should be large enough to allow data scientists to detect the abnormalities (unless all the teams reach an agreement to cheat consistently ;)). Once a history is built over a decade or longer, "unphysiological" power output could be detected quite easily.
It wouldn't be that hard to mandate the riders use pedals that are only fitted at the course/track and otherwise stored by olympic officials. Power meters integrated in pedals have been a thing for a long time now:
All these parts (pedals, cranks etc) are very much an integral part of precisely how you set up the bike, not so much things you swap out without noticing. You'd get pushback from the teams if suddenly you mandated a particular pedal or crank. Some racers are very particular about what pedals they want. And cranks aren't exactly roadside-replacable.
You can be assured the component manufacturers would happily sell "certified" gear, and lots of us would buy it imitating our heroes etc. The parts can be identical to the parts used in training. Said certified gear can meet the olympic standards for data integrity. The cycling industry adores selling "pro" gear to amateur customers and the associated markups (UCI approved!).
This is not that different to amateur motor racing, where its expected you only bring a helmet that's certified by an external body (Snell/FIA etc). There are generally only a handful of pedals designs in use in the pro-peleton today, so not like we are talking about moving a mountain, and the UCI already regulate a lot of existing parts.
As I said, I suspect this is not the main problem with this approach, there are likely many other much better reasons why this isn't a good idea.
- The number of ways data could be faked is frankly staggering
- Drafting is huge
- Since drafting is huge, to win you often have to just "unstick" the rider behind you from your wheel, then stay on his pace for the rest of the distance. So you only need a very short burst (10-15s of effort) where a few watts will make a great difference. That's hard to detect.
- In a climb, everybody will ride differently (different lines, levels of power) due to body shape, current objective, available draft, etc... You end up with insufficient data to reach the level of certainly that would be needed to accuse someone of motor doping
Overall, it's just simpler to just scan all the bikes.
I cannot strongly recommend enough the documentary Icarus, which starts out with the premise of "how hard is it to ask for steroids" and spirals into completely insane territory from there.
Specifically about how Russia (Putin) wanted to look good by making their athletes stronger for their Sochi olympics. The soviet union was also known for doping their athletes for propaganda purposes.
Sure, for training purposes. You know, on a long ride, you don’t want to overdo it. Of course, the actual race bike needs the button for verisimilitude, and it would be a big mistake if a batter was left in, and…
Surely there are certain logistics, like making sure it's charged before the race, or asking, "wouldn't I perform better by losing the extra weight?" being brought up before, no?
I've heard stories of freezing ice inside the seatpost. It will stay frozen long enough to pass the pre-race weigh-in, but melt away before the start of the big climb.
And when does Mephistopheles chime in? I’m fascinated by the idea of doping in general, and there seems to be two distinct kinds: 1) something that everyone is doing (e.g. EPO at the Tour de France or AAS in bodybuilding) and 2) something that will give you an actual edge. “Motor doping” seems to be an example of the latter.
It really boggles my mind that there are people who are capable enough to be in the competition and still decide to cheat in order to win. Not because it’s immoral or dishonourable or anything like that, but just because it’s so fucking lame.
Cycling is a really good example because it is so stark: 1) If you win you make more money, probably a lot more money. I don't know the current numbers, but during the Armstrong years there were plenty of Tour de France level riders that worked wrenching bikes to make ends meet and lived with their parents in the off season. You had Lance on private jets, and then guys on the team making under $30k supporting him. 2) Genetics is huge, you can do everything possible and simply not be good enough, if you've dedicated a big chunk of your life to this dream, you've won at every level, you live a completely monastic lifestyle and constantly diet and you reach your limit the desire to get just a little bit better is strong. The drugs work. 3) If enough people believe that "everyone is doing it" then the psychology of cheating disappears. 4) There is no external pressure or risk; the teams and sponsors don't get burned. When Lance won on a Trek they went from being something like a $200m company to a $2.5B company. They may very well have played a part in it, perhaps unbeknownst to them, but they never had any jeopardy.
They're talking about what is physiologically possible after this year's Tour, it was a complete ass kicking. If your competition is doing things that are believed impossible, do you hang it up? accept defeat? Or rationalize that a few watts isn't really cheating since he's doing something impossible?
Doping as table stakes is understandable. Money too, after a while. But I genuinely wonder how an athlete who put a motor in their bike and then accepted the resulting victory would feel about themselves as a competitor and a person. If they were stoked then by all means go for it, but in that case they must have a different psyche than I do.
> It really boggles my mind that there are people who are capable enough to be in the competition and still decide to cheat in order to win. Not because it’s immoral or dishonourable or anything like that, but just because it’s so fucking lame.
If your competition is cheating you are going to lose if you don't cheat. It has nothing to do with honor - it's just about winning. Cheating may be lame but it's a reality. It's not just limited to sports either. In fact I can't think of anywhere I studied/worked where cheaters/liars didn't get ahead (I know multiple cheating students who got into MIT for grad school, and I know multiple abusive liars who were consistently promoted at unicorn startups or FAANG while simultaneously working to get their honest coworkers fired).
> If your competition is cheating you are going to lose if you don't cheat.
I put that in category #1, which isn't exactly cheating because it doesn't buy you an advantage. Cheating at school or at work is an interesting example. Perhaps by the time cyclists are considering motorizing it's just like... a job? And you have to win to eat?
I certainly don't condone cheating in sports but I have to imagine the sponsorship income and general notoriety opportunities are substantially different for someone who can make it into the top 20 or so of their division vs someone who "only" makes the top 100 or 500. Maybe you get into that top 100 and think you're _so close_ to being one of the people who are both elite at the sport and famous/paid generously for doing it, instead of just quietly and honestly elite.
That's especially true for winning a medal at the Olympics since it's the only event that non-fans can recognize in most sports. You have to know at least a little bit about bike racing to know that the Tour de France is the most prestigious event but everyone recognizes "Olympic gold medal," doesn't even matter what sport.
People also get really nationalistic about their nation's winners so it opens a lot of non-sports-related doors back home. It's the kind of victory an athlete can easily parlay into a cushy sales or consultant position where they don't have to work very hard after their athletic career is over.
> You have to know at least a little bit about bike racing to know that the Tour de France is the most prestigious event but everyone recognizes "Olympic gold medal," doesn't even matter what sport.
This depends a lot on which part of the audience (in particular nationality) you are talking about. I'd say that in Germany (and of course in France) the Tour de France is much more famous for road cycling than the Summer Olympic Games.
> It really boggles my mind that there are people who are capable enough to be in the competition and still decide to cheat in order to win. Not because it’s immoral or dishonourable or anything like that, but just because it’s so fucking lame.
If you have devoted your entire life to a particular sport enough to compete and make a living in it, there inevitably will come a time when your ability to compete is not enough, whether that's due to declining ability or increased competition. When faced with the decision of ending a career or cheating, it is not too surprising that people could choose the latter.
Of course there are many other reasons for cheating, but I imagine that to be a common motivator.
I imagine that the temptation is more to cheat in order to attain what you ‘ought’ to be able to achieve, given perfect conditions. Considered in that way, it’s no longer about seeking something you don’t deserve by deception and more like trying to avoid random fluctuations that seem like they ‘shouldn’t be part of the competition’.
‘If only I hadn’t torn that ligament a few years ago, I’d probably be very slightly faster. I deserve to win this because I’m naturally better. In a perfect world I’d win. By taking this drug, I can negate the unfortunate circumstances and ensure I live up to my true potential.’, etc.
In reality, of course, it’s still plain old cheating. But I imagine it’s fairly easy to rationalise it in your head by thinking along these sort of lines. It’s probably not the same sort of feeling as robbing someone in the street — your morals can remain genuinely intact.
Their rationalizations don’t really matter though, only their incentives/motivation, and there are plenty of rational incentives to cheat, so people do - I simply don’t find this surprising. You see it everywhere else this is the case.
Ok let me phrase it perhaps in a more relatable way -
Your employer asks you to do an unethical or illegal thing. Not doing so will result in you losing your livelihood. Doing so presents a small but measurable risk to you, but you keep your livelihood unless caught, in which case you lose your livelihood anyway. Do you think there is a significant subset of people that take the first choice?
I find it surprising that athletes would choose to make a drastic departure from their prior intentions of fair competition in order to attempt to avoid the inevitability of retirement. I don’t find it nearly as surprising that someone would make a bite-sized compromise in order to preserve their livelihood, even though it seems unwise to me.
Sport qua job has a different feel than sport qua sport, as a sibling commenter illuminated.
There are people who cheat in fucking tetris competitions.
What do you mean your mind is boggled that pro cyclists cheat? Some people will literally sell their grandmothers if it brings them an inch closer to worldwide fame and fortune.
I seem to recall that the most common type of doping is actually to increase recovery, both to make it easier to train hard again the next day and to recover from injuries faster. Apparently it's pretty common in football (soccer) to get injured players back in action, and that's not a sport that most people would think benefits a lot from the classic doping types that increase muscle mass or endurance. Sure they run and have some physical contact, but not that much.
Mechanical cheating is pretty common in sports where it’s viable. NASCAR crews were always finding ways to cheat so much that the saying “if you’re not cheating you’re not trying” was said without irony.
Baseball has a history of guys corking their bats and when caught the excuse is always that the practice bat got mixed in.
Motor doping is somewhat different imho. It's a ballsy move to propose something like "hey, you'd be a faster cyclist if you rode a motorbike". After all with conventional doping it was still your body, sweat and pain.
It’s pretty rational really. You can linger in mediocrity always at risk of being replaced or you could take PEDs and either become competitive and important or get caught and be replaced, the same outcome as not using. Especially if you came from dirt.
They've used thermal cameras in the past to catch this. Motors, especially motors this small putting out this many watts will get warm. Carbon fiber tubes generally don't get very warm. You just have to figure out how to point it at the riders when (or shortly after) you think they may have had the motor running.
I feel sorry for the poor bastards that had to go to Tokyo. As I understand it, clapping the other super fit athletes is a great part of the experience of competing (father was an athletics coach).
I have no plans on competing; for a purely civilian purpose, is there a way to get the "motor doping" stuff for bikes? It seems like it would be kind of cool to get a bit of an artificial push when biking.
Just get a regular pedelec that doesn't look like a regular pedelec. For example something from Fazua (https://fazua.com/), it doesn't scream pedelec right away, still it provides decent electric support and can also be used without the motor. There are for sure way more stealth solutions.
Something I didn't realize before trying one is the different assist settings available. The lowest one just made it feel like I'd slept better and was having an easy ride. The highest assist setting had a really obvious "kick".
The bike I used didn't have a "cruise" setting that moved the bike along while your legs sat still, like I've seen on some bikes.
What does net net mean in this context? Is the implication that there's more riding ebikes vs regular ones and so they're more active? Hard to imagine that there's people taking long rides on ebikes, if they even last that long (25+ miles rides).
I make frequent bike rides to work on my ebike that I would never do on a regular bike since the last stretch is uphill and I don't want to arrive sweaty. So that's 5mi vs 0 in that specific example.
My experience with an e-bike is that range anxiety goes away. You don’t mind traveling further because you know that if you get really tired, the motor will bring you back.
I think the ask is for a cheeky, hidden seat tube motor like one referenced in the article to preserve the bike aesthetic rather than external mounted stuff: https://goatbikes.com/vivax-assist/
I think Scott has one of the cleanest looking road bike ebikes around, but many other brands do the same. With how chunky aero bikes are they are indistungishable to the masses.
I've rented an e-bike where you have to pedal, and it adds "oomph" to your efforts. It feels like having a superpower, pedaling easily up a steep hill.
For those who aren't following starting a few years ago the top cyclists have hit some crazy new levels unseen even in the EPO era and the top ones at this year's Tour De France were smashing power output records and not even looking tired in the winner's case.
I think so far no one has been caught motor doping even though they've looked for it for years. The rumor is the new magic is carbon monoxide rebreathing
Or just altitude camps. In the CO paper they were claiming that CO rebreathing had "similar impact" as altitude camps, which makes a lot of sense given both of them are essentially attempts to deprive body of oxygen.
Don't be surprised if cyclist suddenly all started spending their off season in Tibet or something.
"Based on the numbers, Tadej Pogačar has an FTP close to 7w/kg. These are the highest numbers that we’ve ever seen in professional cycling, and what’s even more incredible is that Pogačar is pushing 7w/kg for 40 minutes after four hours of racing."
This number is useless without the time he was able to hold that value. Lanterne Rouge has calculated that Pog is about 10% over Pantani and Armstrong when it comes to W/kg over time interval.
In context from GP's source, the claim is for the 2004 Alpe d'Huez climb. This was stage 16 of the 2004 tour. The stage was 15.5 km but only 13.9 of that is the actual climb. Lance's total stage time was 39 minutes, 41 seconds, of which it seems like 37 minutes, 36 seconds was the climb[0].
This is an interval on par with Pogacar's climb, although Lance had less same-day load going into the climb.
Comparing raw times isn’t accurate. The technology has improved Massively since Armstrong. Aero, weight, tire design, disc brakes (descending, wet).
And the training is just as drastically improved. Nutrition dialed to the individual, seven days/week. Power meters are ubiquitous. No more “go ride 5 hours with your roommate” for a Saturday training ride - it’s all planned all the time.
This has all happened since Pog was a small child.
Your reasoning is really funny because that's exactly how all the EPO/blood dopers explained their drastically improved performance 20 years ago. Do you seriously believe that Armstrong didn't have individual nutrition and just drove aimlessly 5 hours a day without power meters? You make it sound like he just ate 10 raw eggs with a bottle of red wine before racing like it's 1924.
Feel free to believe that nutrition, material, aero etc. will give you a 10% improvement over the most doped people in the history of cycling, especially on the final climb on plateau de beille, with incredible heat, headwind and after four cat1 climbs. Watch how Pogacar casually drives freehandedly, grabbing a bottle while Vingegaard pushes the fastest climb ever recorded, pulverizing Pantani's record, and seriously tell me this is because he had better breakfast.
> Watch how Pogacar casually drives freehandedly, grabbing a bottle while Vingegaard pushes the fastest climb ever recorded
This was the moment when I stopped watching.
I like Pogačar and there is no way for rider to rebut all the accusations even the rider really is clean.
But it doesn't help that he is riding under people who were doping and managing teams with doping scandals.
Absolutely, I do. The bikes are more aero. The position on the bikes is different - Pog rarely gets out of the saddle on climbs, where LA and Pantani were often slogging out of the saddle. The training plans and nutrition are absolutely superior.
Does any of this mean Pog or Jonas are clean? No. We don’t know either way. All I do know is the anti-doping program is one of the strictest in sports. If people still dope, there’s not much we can do about it. Regardless, I‘ll continue to enjoy cycling as entertainment - there’s no higher meaning to sports - it’s all for fun.
Pog rides like Indurain, staying in the saddle and just punching the watts, that's nothing new. Ullrich adhered to that style and was handily beaten by Armstrong, because Ullrich couldn't match Armstrong's intermediate sprints out of the saddle. Maybe Ullrich's style is actually superior and Armstrong simply had the better juice, we'll never know.
These are just stylistic issues which might bring you a percent or two. The 10% we are seeing now is a world of difference on that level, especially because Pog simply exploded this year, beating both Giro and Tour without much trouble. I also heavily disagree with entertainment being the highest meaning of sports, because then I guess we would just all watch WWE or Peter Thiel's mutant games, but that's a topic for another day.
I’m not even remotely a pro cyclist, but even for me there’s no such thing as “the same bike”. Speaking from my experience with repairing my bike in the ‘90s and feeling different modes the exact same “hardware” can operate in due to the slightest changes.
> just 20 or 30 watts of extra power is enough to tilt the field and clinch a race
Any battery and motor which can deliver that for any appreciable amount of time should be plenty big and heavy enough to easily locate. 30 watts for a 2 hour race = 60 watt hours, over 200 grams of battery. Thats gonna be hard to hide on a bicycle made to be super lightweight.
Looks like the real cheaters are switching bikes between the inspection and the race.
Because road cycling is 95% pushing the endurance/strength of the human body to the limits. Most other sports are a combination of many different skills. Road cycling is mostly about pushing the pedals as strong as possible for the duration of the race.
There's plenty of inspection in motorsport to make sure the cars are conforming to regulation too. Boxers gets checked by the referee before the fight, runner's aren't allowed shoes with a stack height above a certain threshold, etc. Cycling has had high profile doping scandals, but plenty of other sports have more doping but without the scandals. There's not a single bodybuilder or strongman that aren't doping for instance, and it's not even a secret. Plenty of athletes talk about how they make it through the season or individual games by injecting painkillers, cycling has a total ban on all injections.
Motor doping is not a realistic issue, there has been one cyclist getting caught in 2016, and that was in cyclo cross, not road racing. It's just not happening on the higher levels. For instance, this years olympic road race course is 273 km long with 2800 meters of climbing. Even if you could hide a motor and battery from the inspection and other riders, even if a team would be willing to risk their entire future if they got caught, even if nobody in the entire team would say anything, you're only going to fit a very small battery inside a road bike. For most of the 273 km it's unnecessary weight, so even if it was possible to get away with, which I don't think it is, would it even be a net benefit? I doubt it.
Well, the reputation comes directly from a few big scandals in the past - Armstrong/US Postal most obviously.
More generally, it’s obviously an ideal sport for some forms of doping given it’s based around extreme endurance. But there’s probably also lots of doping in other appropriate sports - running has plenty of history, swimming, biathlon, cross-country skiing, etc.
It's because the US' big star was caught doing it, so American media tries to project an image of it being normal in the sport. Same thing as those Soviet weightlifters. The actual prevalence is surely no different from baseball or tennis or what have you.
It is a sport where the race outcome is mostly determined by a rider’s max power output. And the max power output is in large part determined by genetics. Going beyond that max requires some “assistance“.
Pro cycling is very much a middle class sport, people are willing to put a lot of money into getting better beyond just what they themselves can do. A $5K bike is only the beginning.
A world tour pro would lap the field on a $500 bike if racing against a bunch of weekend warriors on $15k bikes. It's such a diminishing amount of performance coupled with a huge amount of advertising.
If you want to spend $15k on a bike - go ahead, just don't be upset when you get overtaken by a 17 year old in gym shorts on a second hand clunker.
Isn't 5k$ more like an entry level bike nowadays? I think people are easily spending 10-20k for a bike, just to feel a tiny bit faster and to brag about it to their friends.
You can either enhance the athlete or the equipment, it just so happens that cycling involves more complex equipment attached to the athlete than most sports. I imagine this is even more of a concern in the Paralympics where various prosthetics, mobility equipment and other assistive technologies could give certain athletes unfair advantages.
Yes. The big tours had big cheating and the omerta going on for almost a hundred of years. And the never caught ex-dopers are now TV commentators or race managers.
Without illegal methods you wouldn't be able to perform at this level. Go watch "Icarus"
> Then, a magnetometer and custom software register disruptions to the field that may indicate the presence of metal or magnets in and around a bike’s carbon-fiber frame.
Hmm, they could try building an energy storage spring made of some composite materials.
These motors are pretty cool. They'll make mountain biking a lot more accessible and for me, a lot more fun since a lot more time on the downhill sections :)
For those not familiar with Tom Boonen, Cancellara effortlessly spinning up the Kapelmuur and putting in so much time that the chase helicopter can't even find him would be like beating Usain Bolt in the 100m by 5 seconds.
Nobody has ever shown that Cancellara was cheating there. Maybe he's just a monster. When Joop Zoetemelk casually disappeared from the front of the pack in the 1985 World Cycling Championship nobody could believe it because Joop was 40 years old. Nevertheless, he did it, and there was no stealth motor technology at the time.
So far, with cycling, P(discovered cheating later | outrageous) ~ 1. Some people will believe that when they go indoors the sun stops shining because there is no longer any proof. It's certainly a strict way to seek one's knowledge. Others have a different view.
Yeah, except for Boonen is a sprinter and a hill climb even a short very steep one is probably the worst terrain for him. Cancellara isn't a climber but as a time trial specialist, he's a lot better suited for the kapelmuur than Boonen. And cancellara is better at descending as well.
I don't buy your comparison with bolt. This is just a video showing someone exploding? Happens all the time. They're riding at the limit for long, and then when one can't handle it anymore the difference is stark.
These are races they're discussing. Not recreational cyclists. Racers are only coasting downhill if they're going so fast they can't pedal faster than their speed. Any energy capture downhill would slow a rider down in a race.
Tangentially, it would be cool to just have sanctioned ebike races. We have motorcycles and cars, why not ebikes? I'd love to watch a high speed, no holds barred e-cyclocross/gravel/MTB race.
But of course that there are e-cycling races. E-Giro took place basically alongside the original race. It's mostly populated by amateurs, but it's still there.
To the GP, an electric mountain bike (eMTB) enduro race is probably not what you are envisioning.
Mountain bike (MTB) enduro is stage racing. Specifically, timed downhill-only sections separated by untimed transfers between stages. The name comes from motorcycle enduro racing. Riders do not go head-to-head like in road cycling, cyclocross or motocross. eMTB enduro is exactly the same format but using electric-motor assisted bikes and, IIRC, one timed uphill stage thrown in.
MTB/eMTB enduro is great fun as a participant sport but either not-there-yet or not-suitable as a spectator sport.
It's because the tiny engine is pretty much useless except for flat courses with a sprint finish. Any mountains and the cyclist have to carry that deadweight all the way just for it to work for the last minute, and by the end of the climb the cyclist carrying this might as well be gapped because of this weight.
Same reason that you see riders jettison their bidons just before a climb in the tour de france.
Not just the headline unfortunately. Doping now means cheating basically - Meriam-Webster documents it as using "or technique to illegally improve athletic performance".
I hate it how we do this to language as well, but this is the nature of culture, it cannot really be mandated, it will just change as people see fit.
I keep getting hung up on semiconductor doping which none of the online dictionaries I tried acknowledge as a form of the phrase. But I guess it fits "to introduce impurities into the system to improve performance"
The etymology of the word is telling, apparently it comes from the dutch word for sauce.
The most important, kamikaze is a term used specifically for a human terminaly guiding themself along with their bomb onto the target. This is what made it so horrifying, If you are doing it remotely, it is not kamikaze, if a computer is guiding, it is not kamikazi.
Secondly, Why invent a new term? If I asked "what do you call a device that is launched, autonomously guides itself to a destination, then explodes" the answer would be a "guided missile", this term has served this role well for many years, drones were unmanned aircraft used mainly for reconnaissance or training/target duty. When you strapped a bomb to it, the term for this sort of unmanned aircraft was "cruise missile"
This is also my problem with the term "motor doping". doping makes absolutely no sense here in any previously used form of the word. When the magic low friction swimsuit was developed then banned, nobody called it cloth doping. the banned brush spike for running shoes, nobody called it shoe doping. Just because you are cheating does not make it doping.
i don't know, i think the term is very understandable and fitting. everyone knows what kamikaze planes were, so when they hear the term 'kamikaze drone' they know it must be about a drone sacrificing itself through a planned, destructive collision.
i actually disagree more with your suggestion of calling them 'cruise missiles', as that's an actual current-day term which is actively being used to describe weapons in current conflicts. they're self-navigation missiles cruising to their target.
most of the 'kamikaze drones' we see in ukraine are being flown by humans, the only reason the operator doesn't die is because they're controlling it remotely/virtually.
i get what you mean, however i don't understand why it bothers you so much. lots of terms and words we use are not 100% accurate but understandable because of a shared context.
Cycling has the second strictest out-of-competition testing regime (second to athletics). They put pro sports like football (US) and baseball to shame.
It’s also nothing new. Cycling has been known for doping for 100 years or more. Armstrong took it to new heights but it’s always been there and always will be.
For me, I’m more interested in doping control for the safety of athletes. Potentially equalizing competition is second to me. After all, it’s “just” entertainment.
If we want to see the best athletes, then we need to allow them to do whatever it takes to be their best. We want the best*. Is the best they can do with limits
yeah, it seems weird that certain scientific and technological breaktroughs are seen as cheating while other are not.
nutrition and sports science have made training far more effective than it used to be. materials science has created lighter/better/faster everything.
the only harm i can see is if it encourages unhealthy behavior (i.e., convincing people to take dangerous supplements, potentially early in their career before theyve even come close to 'making it')
i often think this about the olympic gymnasts, some of whom are so much shorter than normal for the ages that i wonder if the activity altered their growth.
I'm not sure - there are other disciplines where PEDs are as much of a problem as in cycling, and the possibility of other forms of cheating, like motor doping, isn't really feasible elsewhere.
No, it's just that nobody wants to look too closely at other big sports. The same Spanish doctor who got busted for working with a lot of cyclists was also working with a lot of Spanish footballers at a time when their national team won both Euros and World Cup. Yet, the last part was quietly swept under the rug...
the other leagues have arenas which are vehicles for bribes. Cycling events span many different regions , are not as lucrative and don't have the means to cover up doping scandals like the other leagues do.
Bikes can already be built WAY below the minimum weight set by UCI (6.8kg), so that doesn’t help - it’s easy to install a motor, battery, and still come in right at the limit.
Bikes are at a point where they can be lighter than the UCI mandated minimum weight. Aero has been the name of the game for a while as well, so it's possible that a riders bike already is heavier than expected for aero benefit
I desperately want an Olympic games where everyone is allowed to do whatever they want to win; where cheating is not only accepted, it's strongly encouraged.
Everyone comes roided up and doped out of their minds, and we see the limits the human body is truly capable of.
This is a nice idea until you think about the fact that bodybuilding is the only sport where professional athletes consistently die younger than their non-athlete peers, often considerably so. Steroids are not fun get big muscle candy, they thoroughly wreck your body and then you die.
Olympian competitors using PEDs aren't running around on vast amounts of aromatase inhibitors and diuretics to completely eliminate all water from their bodies - this is practically standard in pro bodybuilding.
Powerlifters don't die nearly as frequently and it's largely because aesthetic dryness isn't required.
Olympians also aren't explicitly trying to obtain mass as a goal and wouldn't customarily be walking around at 5'10"/300lbs (for instance - extrapolate) as a bodybuilder might in their off-season. Excess mass is usually detrimental in most Olympic sports and is avoided.
Being medically obese, regardless of body composition, is tough on the human heart - add in extreme/forced dehydration, stimulants, and possibly recreational drugs, and you have a recipe for early expiration.
Folks who would participate embrace the "live hard, die young" mantra. We love folks who do this in our society. James Dean is still the coolest man who ever lived, and a significant reason for that is that he joined the 27 club in a car crash.
They should make it more interesting by requiring a minimum age of 45 or whatever depending on sport, that will avoid the issue of damage that some of the peds can do to the young and impressionable. Plus normal athletes could come back into sports so there is a definitive before and after with a group that generally clean before. Plus what better way to demonstrate the anti aging effect than on people otherwise too old to be competitive.
I suppose you are only referring to the young directly involved, but the young watching the comp could also be just as impressionable and start looking into using the same drugs.
But my real take is this hopefully gets everyone to understand how meaningless/ugly this all is and actually combats PED use that way.
Seeing their parents do it should make it less cool.
Having seen what kind of adults such bubble wrapped children turn into I think that perhaps some risk should be acceptable, let nature sort a few things out, and understand we're not all going to survive to old age. As sad as it is to see a child die before their time, I think it's more sad to see adults who have never lived.
I taken a lot of PEDs for therapeutic reasons to combat the effects of ME/CFS, mainly hGH peptides and Test Cypionate but also some of the esoteric stuff as well. So I'm generally pro PEDs when done in moderation. Obviously some people go overboard.
I think a lot of innate athletic prowess is higher endogenous level of many of the same PEDs so you could probably identify likely athletes with DNA tests. So what are these competitions for, to figure out who has the better DNA + work ethic? I'm all for armature sports done for the benefit of the participants.
Because one, it's dangerous to people's health; how far are people willing to go?
Second, not everyone has access to the same "help". I mean to a point this is true today as well as not everyone has access to universities developing snake scale outfits or what have you, but at the same time most olympic sports are still about the human performance. But this is why e.g. F1 has such strict regulations that get tightened every year; if it hadn't, the richest team would win, or the one that has an innovation this year (like side skirts) that other teams don't.
> or the one that has an innovation this year (like side skirts) that other teams don't.
This honestly sounds like a very interesting competition to me that I'd love to see: a competition that is about both the athletes and the engineers behind the winning athletes.
I want to see the unholy abominations that would come out of a billionaire match-up between Bezos, Musk, and Gates all sponsoring a competitor. Just a heap of unnatural flesh, vaguely in the shape of a human, pumped full of every possible performance-enhancing drug to be the best possible athlete.
Actually, my entire premise for this is actually based on F1 racing, and how they operate. Every team literally has no rules, other than: Do not kill or injure anyone. Nearly anything else outside of that very broad limit would be allowed. I just think it would end up being very interesting and funny.
Also strongman and USPA powerlifting- in both performance enhancing drugs are completely allowed, and top athletes even post about using them on Instagram... which is wild because they're still illegal.
USPA has a tested division now and it's been gaining in popularity--it will soon be more popular than the untested division if it isn't already. Most of the top untested powerlifters have moved over to the WRPF (which does also have its own tested division). There are a lot of other smaller, regional, untested feds. Then there's the IPF and USAPL and their affiliates, which are fully tested, and are now far more popular than any of the untested feds. Untested might never go away, but tested has rapidly surpassed it in recent years.
Yes, exactly! For most sports, the rule would be: Do not kill or injure your opponent. But for contact sports like basketball, I think a good brawl would really liven up the game! Brass knuckles is almost certainly too much, but the idea of knocking out all your opponents so they can't score would actually make basketball much more interesting and strategic. Basketball + Boxing would make a fun combo!
Oh for sure, I'm not joking at all actually! I've enjoyed watching chess-boxing before, I figured putting boxing into other sports that are actually physical would at the very least be entertaining! We've had the same sports for so long, let's spice it, do some fun fusion stuff, haha
Instead, how about sealing up the downtube and filling it with a weakly exothermic gas producing mixture* and then adding some turbine blades — sorry I mean “triple butted crank stiffeners”, your honour — to the bottom bracket instead? One doesn’t normally pedal at 10,000 RPM so some other sort of gas-energy harvester design would be better but you get the idea.
In a similar way to the case of the [spoiler alert] man stabbed with an icicle, the evidence will neatly and literally evaporate into thin air**.
*Something on the chemical spectrum between “science fair volcano” and “sugar and fertilizer oh whoops I’ve made a pipe bomb” ought to do it.
**Erm, apart from the gas turbine bit.