Thermal camera footage allegedly shows pro cyclists using motors | Hacker News Reader

Thermal camera footage allegedly shows pro cyclists using motors

fittish.deadspin.com

432 pointsphreeza298 comments

Just take the bike out of the race entirely. Declare a year in advance that the bike will be XYZ model Q so people can train on them, and the race maintains custody of all race bikes, spares, etc.

It's already a money-competition to see who can buy the best super-bike. Yes, you have to have a minimum weight, but that just means that you can take a superbike and spend the extra weight applying aerodynamic fairings whereas someone else has to spend that weight on their frame or whatever.

Just take the bike out of the picture entirely. You ride this bike. Or one of these three models. Or whatever.

The last time I bought a new bicycle, I had to try a lot of them before I found one I really enjoyed. I'd imagine world-class cyclists are even pickier than I am.

I think they're picky about who pays them the most.

They are picky about winning. Money will make all the difference if they have no preference, but if they don't like something or are slower, there's no way someone who finishes in the top three would be willing to trade more money from one sponsor for moving down in the rankings.

Yeah, it'd be like telling marathoners they have to wear a specific model of shoe. There's so many factors that go into comfort etc.

Except that the team get sponsored by a manufacturer, and it's not picked by the riders.

To an extent, and seemingly always with frames. But pro riders often use parts that aren't "sponsership approved" - they just make them all black or similar (rather than have another manfacturer's logo on them)

And the manufacturer then works with the team/riders to make sure they get a bike that works for them.

The biggest differentiator is height. I assume taller people have more muscle power hence should be put in different category.

Frame size is actually quite important for fitting a bike to a person. However, it's certainly something that could be varied within a model, just like a shoe has different sizes, or whatever. Multiple frame sizes are available on everything but the cheapest bikes - I had a choice of frame sizes on a standard Schwinn aluminum-framed bike 15 years ago.

Given the choice of 5 high-end bikes and the ability to select a proper size I don't really see a problem.

Most champion cyclists aren't tall. What matters isn't power, but rather power to weight ratio.

That depends on the discipline. In general, track sprinters are heavyweights, kings of the mountains are flyweights.

Taller people also have more person to carry around.

The biggest challenge is aerodynamics. If you're over 6'3" and want to be at all comfortable you're going to present a much larger frontal area than someone shorter.

They get team bikes. They aren't picky.

Long gone are the days of a pro rider turning up on a relabelled bike of their choice (their bike, their sponsors' logos).

The bikes tend to be distinct enough that they are definitely riding the frame of their team sponsor, and the wheels have become similarly distinctive too (no more Lightweights disguised as Mavic).

At the amateur level, bikes are always customized by the rider to some degree. Teams are usually sponsored by both a manufacturer and a bike shop, so riders have a good source of discounted components. It's not uncommon for them to strip the bike down to the frame and rebuild it the way they like. The manufacturers also ask for feedback on the frame designs and tweak them every year. I can't imagine things are much different at the pro level.

This is not about fixing the problem. Actually in professional cycling nobody is interested in fixing the problem. They want to give the appearance that it's fair, but there are massive conflicts of interests between organizers, sponsors and teams to prevent a "clean sport" equilibrium to take place.

Technology is an integral part of cycling, just as it is in motorsport. There are some one-design motorsport racing classes, but they are far from the most popular. Fans like to see innovation, we like to coo over the beautiful new machinery on display.

Some of the greatest moments in cycling are directly related to technical progress, most obviously the Obree/Boardman battle for the hour record. On one side a professional champion with a million pound superbike, on the other an unknown amateur with a bike he built himself. Many fans complain that the current regulations are too conservative and provide too little opportunity for technical innovation.

Cycle racing exists in a symbiotic relationship with cycle manufacturing. Race wins sell bikes, bike sales fund race wins. Cut the manufacturers out of the sport and they take a huge chunk of sponsorship with them.

If technology is integral, then why ban motors at all? Small motors and powerful compact energy supplies are technological advancements.

It's a balance between man and machine, between tradition and progress.

F1 racing cars would be faster if they replaced the driver with a computer. The fans want to see the skills of the driver tested, so the sport bans common driver aids like traction control and anti-lock brakes.

Cycling with motors isn't cycling, it's motorcycling. Allowing motors would change the sport in an undesirable and irrevocable manner.

In cycling, technological progress is governed by the Lugano Charter. Technology is an intrinsic part of the sport, but it is not allowed to play a dominant role.

http://oldsite.uci.ch/imgarchive/Road/Equipment/The%20Lugano...

Interestingly though - those now-banned-in-F1 driver aids are all over showroom floors and making regular cars safer. (as are older technologies initially developed in top level racing - disk brakes, fuel injection, radial tires, etc...)

Racing in all it's forms is nearly always conducted under some entirely arbitrary artificial constraints (even when the rules don't enforce it, money ends up taking the same place). Sometimes those constraints are "we'll sell more cars if they all look a little bit like Fords or Chevys", sometimes they're more like "we've got home-team advantage, so we'll make the rules say you've got to sail your America's Cup contender to Newport to compete, even if you come from Europe/New Zealand instead of Rhode Island...". Sometimes the constrains are "these new 4WD supercharged Group B Rally Cars are killing too many people, lets stop racing anything that fast thru the trees - lets race showroom floor shopping trolly hatchbacks instead..."

Keep in mind that "Cycling with motors" isn't motorcycle racing either - in motorcycle racing there's engine capacity limits, number of cylinders, number of gear ratio limits, minimum weights, restrictions on brake materials, even things like limits on the number of motors used for a season and work allowed to be done on motors between races, and MotoGP are now "standardising" the engine management electronics/software as well... WorldSBK have homologation rules, where you need to sell a certain number of your racing motorcycle to the general public as road bikes to be allowed to race (modified) version in the race series. (I'm currently riding round a two stroke 125 Cagiva Mito that's a roadgoing version of the now banned/superseded 125GP bikes... These day's you've got no choice but to compete on a 250cc four stroke in that race series/class. In the past there were 8 cylinder bikes, and bikes with 16 speed gearboxes - all just history/legends now...)

A lot of "the balance" seems to end up being about money - either to stop the guy with the deepest pockets from wining everything (who'd want to go sail boat racing against Larry Ellison without some rules about how much he can spend?), or to make sure the sponsors keep pouring money into "the sport" (how many F1 rules do you suppose there are relating to drivers meeting corporate and sponsor hospitality and media requirements, rather than technical regulations about what you're allowed to race on the track?)

> Technology is an intrinsic part of the sport, but it is not allowed to play a dominant role.

I can't make any sense of this. Any bicycle is 100% a product of technology. I can't think of anything that plays a more dominant role in bicycle racing than... bicycles.

I fairly sure the cyclist has a fair amount to do with it. You can't just buy a £10k rig and win the Tour.

If we vary a bicycle race one way, by replacing the bicycles with walking sticks, which require no technology as long as you're willing to put in the time to find one rather than carving it; and vary it another way, by replacing the cyclists with monkeys -- which of those two resulting races (humans with walking sticks vs monkeys with bicycles dimensioned appropriately to the monkeys) is more similar to a "bicycle race"?

You can have a bicycle race without cyclists; you can't have one without technology. Technology is playing a dominating role.

I tend to suspect that jdietrich didn't mean to include things like metallurgy, rubber, and gears under the umbrella of "technology", but there is no actual line between the use of gears and the use of motors.

> there is no actual line between the use of gears and the use of motors.

There's a very clear line in this case. Cycling is a human powered sport. Battery, gasoline, nuclear, and other power sources are not allowed. This is why mopeds are not allowed. Also prohibited is temporary power storage like a capacitor or spring, which might be used for regenerative braking.

You can put all the motors you want on your bike (IMHO) so long as you don't energize them.

Only a specific set of technology is allowed in a bike race. Under UCI rules, cyclist aren't allowed to use aeroshells, and recumbent bicycles are also prohibited, even though both are much more "similar" to a bicycle than your proposed monkey with a walking stick.

The rules attempt to describe the ineffable concept of what it means to be a "bicycle race". They are meant to encapsulate a mass consensus based on tradition and expectations, including the idea of how to balance "human" and "technology". The rules must also face the challenge of changes in technology, and ever-present rules lawyering. The Lugano charter, mentioned earlier, tries to capture and influence that mass consensus.

There are different interpretations of what a "bicycle race" means, which is why there are different rules organizations. If you want to run a race which allows a monkey with a walking stick to compete, feel free!

I thought the monkeys got bikes rather than sticks?

> There's a very clear line in this case. Cycling is a human powered sport. Battery, gasoline, nuclear, and other power sources are not allowed. This is why mopeds are not allowed. Also prohibited is temporary power storage like a capacitor or spring, which might be used for regenerative braking.

Doesn't a derailleur have to have a spring in it? And any chain will have a certain amount of tension that allows it to store a (small) amount of energy. Heck, even standing up on the pedals is a way of storing energy to use later.

> Only a specific set of technology is allowed in a bike race. Under UCI rules, cyclist aren't allowed to use aeroshells, and recumbent bicycles are also prohibited, even though both are much more "similar" to a bicycle than your proposed monkey with a walking stick.

This makes me sad. Is there a formula/series that allows any kind of purely human-powered vehicle, whether it looks like a traditional bicycle or not? I'd love to watch that.

Like I said, "ever-present rules lawyering".

Even "purely human-powered vehicle" is suspect to rules lawyering. Rompelberg cycled at 268.8 km, in the wake of a dragster pace-car. Would your hypothetical race allow that, given that the vehicle is still human powered?

> Even "purely human-powered vehicle" is suspect to rules lawyering. Rompelberg cycled at 268.8 km, in the wake of a dragster pace-car. Would your hypothetical race allow that, given that the vehicle is still human powered?

The dragster wouldn't be allowed on the course - that seems easy enough to rule out.

Several organisations promote races for non-UCI bikes.

http://www.ihpva.org/ http://www.bhpc.org.uk/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR9Nykvp_-I

> Doesn't a derailleur have to have a spring in it?

Indeed, a lot of them now have batteries and electric motors. I was surprised how easily electronic shifting was allowed into the sport.

So yes, many pro-racing bikes already have battery power, even though it's not directly driving the bike. It could be argued that some kind of KERS would be a natural evolution of this.

>> which of those two resulting races (humans with walking sticks vs monkeys with bicycles dimensioned appropriately to the monkeys)

> Under UCI rules, cyclist aren't allowed to use aeroshells, and recumbent bicycles are also prohibited, even though both are much more "similar" to a bicycle than your proposed monkey with a walking stick.

> If you want to run a race which allows a monkey with a walking stick to compete, feel free!

Consider reading my comment before you respond to it. If you want to argue that bicycles are more similar to bicycles than they are to walking sticks... that was most of the point of my comment, too.

I want to argue that "similar" is irrelevant to the topic.

You just pointed out that the rules of bicycle races, as a class, are intensely concerned with what counts as a bicycle. This is a question of similarity.

More, it just illustrates my point that it is nonsensical to claim that "technology is not allowed to play a dominant role" in cycling. All of those rules are concerned with which technologies are required in a race (say, wheels), which are allowed, and which are forbidden. If you eliminated technology from cycling, cycling wouldn't exist. If you took an anything-goes approach, cycling again wouldn't exist -- you'd have racing, but nothing anyone would recognize as a bicycle.

And so immense amounts of attention and effort are devoted to the question of which technologies to use. Using the wrong one will get you disqualified. Abstaining from the wrong one will get you disqualified. The technological decisions made by rules committees govern the performance of the racers, and everyone knows and acknowledges that. This is a dominant role for technology. If you divide cycling as a sport into several parts, and one of those parts includes "technology", that part is much more important than every other part combined can be.

1.0001 is very close to 1. But if the rules say that the the value must be between 0 and 1 then the similarity doesn't matter. Only the rules, as interpreted by the judges, matter for the decision of if a motor or a monkey is allowed in the given race.

I believe you do not understand what "dominate" means in this thread. It's clear that technology is an essential component, not only for the bike, as you mentioned, but also the paved roads. It's clear that humans are an essential component, not only as a power source but also the efforts of many to develop better training methods.

It's also clear that the legal system is an important component, since the force of law helps keep people off the otherwise public roads during the races.

All of these are essential. Do you consider them all to be dominate?

I don't. Most people don't watch a bike race to see how well the road is maintained, or look at the barricades set up, or marvel at the supply chain to support a cyclist from stop to stop.

No, most of them are there to watch the riders, and to a lesser extent the gear. The Lugano charter makes it explicit that a UCI goal is to reflect a certain historical and sociological understanding of what cycling should be. It even says that the technology used should be subordinate to the physical qualities of the rider.

You can use a different interpretation of what "dominate" means, but note that your objection was an interpretation of a summary by jdietrich, who also provided a reference to the source document. Your interpretation since then is not compatible to the source document.

In my opinion, you misunderstood jdietrich's comment from the start and continue to argue against a viewpoint and interpretation that no one actually asserts.

In cycling culture, some things are definitely legal or illegal, but there's a considerable grey area of "don't take the piss". It's technically illegal to draft team cars, but you'll only get penalised if you're a jersey contender or you're being blatant about it. The sticky bottle and the magic spanner are the stuff of cycling lore.

That attitude partly explains the historical prevalence of doping. There was no honour in using drugs to win a race, but there was no dishonour in using drugs just to get through a tour. Nobody minded very much if a domestique took a few pep pills. Doping only really became a major issue after the Festina affair, when it transpired that leading riders from a successful team were systematically doping to win races.

I'd love to see an autonomous F1 series!

That would actually be very interesting. Instead of drivers competing, it would be code competing.

or, even better, AI competing.

AI is code

And code is speech. Does that mean AI is speech? Man, that's a weird thought.

Are they considered legal persons then?

There's an initiative to do just that.

http://www.roborace.com

Great comment, thank you.

It wouldn't be the same Tour De France if they used mopeds.

Because motorcycle racing is an entirely different sport.

It's hard to disagree from my own perspective of a commuting cyclist who would like to see racing drive cycling advancement in ways that trickle down to affordably solving the last mile(s) problem for the human race, but allowing more than a single human as the source of power would simply transform the sport into something else. It's not necessarily better or worse, but using a motor is a fundamentally different activity and begs all sorts of arbitrary dimensions/mass/power restrictions or else it turns into a motorcycle race. There might not be a more efficient animal than a human on a bicycle, but we don't hold a candle to a Ducati.

What about a flywheel? Probably a net negative. What about a motor with no battery. You pedal to power it? Just wondering what the limit of "human powered" is

A clutched flywheel would probably be an advantage in many kinds of terrain. Imagine being able to spin up the flywheel from pedalling or gravity (geared) while going downhill, and then when you hit an uphill section you kick in the gear and pedal easy. It would essentially turn most tracks into "flat" tracks.

No the extra weight of a flywheel plus motor/generator would far outweigh any small advantage. The energy density is just too low for any flywheel small enough to fit on a bike. And the gyroscopic effects would mess with handling.

Bikes already have two really large flywheels.

They don't spin fast enough nor with enough mass to help you climb a hill ...

And people spend a lot of money to make them store just a tiny little less energy.

Except when they are chasing the hour record. Ondrej Sosenka ran 3.2 kg wheels in his 2005 hour record precisely for the flywheel effect.

Every tiny acceleration derived from a pedal stroke has to be transferred from bike to rider by hands and back. It's not "work" in the physical sense if you look at the bike as your frame of reference, but it requires biological effort nonetheless. As long as you don't need to brake, more storage in the wheels is better. This effect would be strongest in a climb, but there you certainly only want heavy wheels if you can compensate with a lighter frame or parts (and if the inevitable braking on the subsequent descent does not call for less storage).

But there's a catch: even on a track, lighter wheels will _feel_ faster, because you get stronger feedback from oscillations I'm your pedal stroke.

No matter how heavy you made the bike wheels, any kinetic energy stored in them would be used up in the first few meters of a steep hill on any road course. Then you have to drag those heavy weights up the hill. So no, more storage in the wheels isn't better (outside of a totally flat track).

Citation? Flywheels can be very efficient especially with modern engineering. And it could be oriented so that the gyroscopic effects were stabilizing or destabilizing as desired, plus I think in any case riders would adapt quickly - I ride a "twitchy" bike with no front fork sometimes, and my old professor built a bike with a counter-rotating flywheel to disprove the myth that cyclists rely on gyroscopic effects to stabilize them.

That's really interesting about the gyroscopic effects myth, as it is one I strongly believe! Is there some documentation of the bike or some analysis of this I can read?

http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~hemh/gyrobike.htm

Thanks!

It's not a myth that gyroscopic effects contribute to stabilization, but rather that it explains the stabilization fully. It's usually phrased as "scientists still don't understand how bikes work [in terms of their stability]", which is pretty amazing if you think about it.

Actually, since about 5 years ago bicycle stability is pretty well understood: http://bicycle.tudelft.nl/stablebicycle/

Prof Ruina? I loved his class.

No, Dr Hunt (see link in cousin). I actually only had him as a tutor but didn't want to complicate things.

Ah. I see that now. I had Ruina for Dynamics, and talked a bunch with Jim Papadopoulos. Fun Times.

What kind of citation are you looking for? This is just common engineering knowledge. The airtight safety housing alone would be way too heavy for bike racing. You can't have a flywheel spinning at zillion rpm sitting out in the open because it could kill someone in a crash. Plus the flywheel would need to be in a near vacuum to avoid air drag.

Or a motor + battery but the battery has to start discharged. Basically the same as the flywheel I guess, except you have a little more control over when the energy you store gets used.

As a fellow cycling commuter, I agree with your sentiment,but I would argue that the rules of cycling racing now prevent a much more innovative environment that could trickle down to us commuters. In particular, the frame shape limits that keep everything as a double diamond. For efficient human power, the best designs are usually recumbents, but very little money has gone into that area because recumbents are not allowed in races.

Why ban steroids? Why ban amphetamines? Whyban surgical modification? Why ban genetic engineering? Why ban motorised exo skeletons and nano technology? (I just read a great short story along these lines called ""Slipping" by Lauren Brookes - from the EFF'S PWNING TOMORROW short fiction anthology...)

The same question applies to all of those. If we allow technological enhancements, why is one enhancement too far? You couldn't run the course as fast as you can cycle it, after all. The same argument applies to all those other things - if we allow them then the playing field needs to stay absolutely level otherwise the person who can afford the strongest drugs, the newest gene-splicing, and the most efficient exoskeleton wins.

It's either about the athletic competition or it's not. If it's about the athletic condition, then the impact of technological factors should be minimized.

Then it'll be like, "why can I only have two wheels?"

Bicycle racing, whose equipment is required to have only one source of power, a certain minimum weight, and no disc brakes (and maybe a couple others) is probably one of the less-constrained pro sports.

Isn't there some secret conspiracy against recumbents? Some "tradition" rules disguising the "big diamond-frame" bike manufacturing cartel's absolute control over road racing rules, who know they'd get handed their asses by the Unix beard-o crowd on recumbents in a fair race? ;-)

The current bike rider position (on the diamond bike) makes riding less energy efficient, for one, and more agile - rider can more easily change direction or start sprinting or both.

All of this make bike riding sport more entertaining. I guess I can put it next to Formula 1 - low and high velocities, fast and slow turns, attacks, defense, etc.

The recumbent riding would be mostly technological and would have less action. I guess I can put it next to NASCAR - high velocities, slow turns, slow attacks.

I think that recumbent would be good for US, I also guess rest of world would prefer diamond bikes.

It's already about which country/team/city can spend the most money scouting the best talent, or poaching them from ever-expanding pools.

Then there's the matter of paying the most for the best coaches, best data analytics to optimize the bio performance of the human individual, etc.

I'd argue that you can't really say that money is the reason for not include or limiting technology. If it's about a level playing field, then money should be the first thing to remove.

How about a random sampling of a country/city's population? Have them compete against each-other. Otherwise, it'll always be about money as it's integral to sport.

This is exactly what I was getting at.

You have to ban things that are outright bad for athletes. You also have to remember, given a competition people will do whatever it takes to win, because someone else will. So you have to draw the line somewhere.

Why though? In many areas of life, people for example work themselves to death voluntarily. Why is there not a sport where there are really no limits at all?

Because at some point it stops being fun to watch if your race from point A to B is won by a supersonic fighter jet.

Also there's the pesky little problem of poor or up and coming athletes literally killing themselves to try to win big money, all for the benefit of some FIFA-alike and its sponsors.

>Because at some point it stops being fun to watch if your race from point A to B is won by a supersonic fighter jet.

Not when the opponent pulls out a surface to air missile.

ha! This is exactly the kind of out-of-the box thinking that jet cycling needs!

> You have to ban things that are outright bad for athletes.

You're assuming all those things are bad for the athletes.

That would probably be the first sporting event I'd watch! Imagine a race with three legged cyclists! That would be awesome!

The answers are not necessarily the same for all those, and for all future scenarios. The conventional answer today is that sport should promote, among other things, a healthy life. Taking large amounts of amphetamines is not so healthy, but some of the currently-legal ways that pro athletes prep for competition are also not very healthy, like the use of extreme and possibly dangerous amounts of caffeine in many sports. Maybe people will do more bike touring than bike racing because racing has become pointless and un-compelling to follow as a fan.

It may be that many professional and elite amateur sports will not survive genetic modification, for example, because anyone can access elite athletic potential if they wanted to. Or, more disturbingly, only if their parents had chosen a genetic combination for one outcome over another. What would be the point of "being a fan" of an athlete with characteristics chosen from a menu?

It crosses the border between using human muscles' energy output (and optimising the mechanical efficiency of that) and using some other energy source. Which is a fairly clear barrier for anyone to understand.

How about something in between? A rider and a manufacturer can work together to design a new bike for that rider, but for actual races the manufacturer has to build an instance of that bike under supervision of race officials and turn it over to them, and it is that instance that the rider must use in the race. Once the bike is turned over to race officials, no one is allowed unsupervised access.

That allows innovation, while making it much harder for a rider and team to cheat.

Wouldn't that be more work than just inspecting the bikes?

Those bikes tend to get stripped down every day. Some of the frame designs have at times been rated for less than 10k miles, meaning they wear out at some point, possibly before the end of the race.

For instance a commercial aluminum frame is overbuilt so that it doesn't vibrate itself to pieces, but if you are going to get a new one in a week why bother?

Frames are OTS products under current UCI regulations. But fitting that frame to the rider involves a lot of individual tweaking by the team mechanic, so you can't really lock them down ahead of time. But with IR cameras and a reasonable identification system directing post-race (our post-change) physical searches motor cheating should be easy enough to control, very much unlike PEDs.

Cycle racing exists in a symbiotic relationship with cycle manufacturing

How many racing teams are named after bicycle manufacturers?

Of the current world tour [1]: five.

  * BMC RACING TEAM
  * CANNONDALE PRO CYCLING TEAM
  * LAMPRE - MERIDA
  * TEAM GIANT - ALPECIN
  * TREK - SEGAFREDO

(I may have missed some)

But note that many if not all teams are sponsored by manufacturers (frames, wheels, geartrain, etc).

Edit: five. Forgot Merida.

[1] http://www.uci.ch/road/teams/

Lampre-Merida too. So 5 total.

4 I think: Cannondale, Lampre Merida, Giant Alpecin, Trek Segafredo.

> There are some one-design motorsport racing classes, but they are far from the most popular.

NASCAR would like a word with you.

Edit to add: I know that NASCAR allows more than a single design, but it's in the same spirit. The options are extremely limited.

Why are recumbent bikes banned then? They're entirely human powered, and far more efficient.

> Technology is an integral part of cycling

Cheating is an integral part of cycling

I agree. This is what happened to swimming with the super-suits. It became a matter of who can buy the best technology and a bunch of records came crashing down until they banned all the high-tech suits. Ian Thorpe's 400m freestyle record was thought to last for a least a decade or two and poof it was gone.

I don't know a lot about it, but Keirin racing is super highly regulated on the equipment side. Essentially everyone has to have the same bike, with there being only a handful of parts manufacturers that have to make everything conforming to a certain spec. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keirin

Moreover, the spec has held pretty much steady on mid-1970s equipment.

Essentially the original "Formula" idea.

UCI already regulates weight and aero features on the bike.

The rules should change to mandate 1 bike, no swaps to keep riders from changing from a "doped" bike to a non-doped one before finishing - or provide better chain of evidence reporting on existing bikes.

There's a huge difference in weight/tech from pro/non-pro bikes. Take a look at what's available for triathlons vs. UCI time trial bikes.

People that don't write software but use software say the same thing about operating systems.

"Why are there even more than one? It is absurd!"

Wow is this really what your sample is like? Most people I know implicitly understand the concept of consumer choice and don't have any trouble applying that to OSes. IPhone vs android probably played a big hand in that, but even before that, there was a good solid chunk that understood that Mac was an alternative to Windows (before OS X really blew up)

My guess is that you rarely spend time with people outside of tech without tipping them.

One of the more interesting bicycle races of the year does exactly this: the Little 500 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_500)

All the bikes are identical in spec (single speed, coaster brake, flat pedals).

This is the race that features in the movie Breaking Away. I wish more were like it, but I guess part of its charm is its uniqueness.

It sounds like a good idea, but in reality, the sport of road cycling is and always has been extremely heavily dependent on bicycle manufacturers. You could probably make an argument that professional cycling exists mostly for the purpose of selling bikes. At the moment, five of the eighteen WorldTour teams (they're the top level teams) have names like BMC Racing Team and Trek-Segafredo, and I don't think they'd be very happy about everybody riding unbranded bikes.

> Just take the bike out of the race entirely.

Or let riders register their preferred bike components at the start of every season, and then UCI could check the weight of bikes during races.

What are you proposing is to cut out money from the sport.

Meh. Hopefully this will eventually result in a cool electric bike that could be mass-produced.

I used to be an enthusiastic bicycle racing spectator. I would watch hours of the Tour De France everyday if I had the chance and pay close attention to other races.

No longer.

I have long since stopped watching, or caring what happens in bicycle racing. As far as I am concerned, the winner is the best cheat who has not been caught yet. I would not be the slightest bit surprised if half these guys had induction motors in their seats and batteries inserted up their backsides.

This is deeply unfair to those who do not cheat, but I am so tired of being disappointed by endless drug and cheating scandals in cycling that I would rather spend my time watching golf or something that does not involve a lot of cheating.

Never mind batteries up their backsides, blood doping is still rife, even at an amateur level. Many sportspeople have "that fridge", in which they keep spare blood for races - and it's very hard to detect - you have to look for puncture wounds.

the thing with mechanical doping is that if you aren't caught red-handed, you are free, with doping some races/competitions will freeze your samples and they can be tested years later to find out if you were using something that wasn't testable yet, but with mechanical doping, once you're done the race you're safe.

And over a course of a grand tour stage, even if the boost is only 25W, it can easily make the difference between winning and being maybe in the top 10, ask any cyclist how much a 25W higher FTP would be worth in a mountain stage...

How long do they typically use a bike?

For big races, it might not be entirely absurd to cut up the frame after the race, just to be sure.

From the video linked, it sounds like they can (legally) switch bikes during the race, so they could just switch back to a legit bike close to the finish.

Even with a big lead you would be hard-pressed to have a mechanical requiring a bike change and still win. Yes you can switch bikes but you will be trailing the peloton by then (where the support cars are.) Early or mid-race you could catch up to the peloton and possibly make it back up front with a lot of effort but probably not within the last 20km or more.

Cut up all the bikes. Or use the more reasonable suggestion in the sibling to my comment and just dismantle them enough to do a good inspection.

Or, you know, just X-Ray them. Aren't most competition-level bikes using carbon fibre frames these days? For metal frames, ultrasound would work just as well.

X-Ray would work on the thing aluminum chassis of a low end racing bike too. You might have to crank the power up a little, but it's going to see those powerful little magnets clear as day.

Usually a bike frame is used during the course of a whole season except the rider crashes it. The other components are replaced as needed such as drivetrain, brake pads, cables, rims, and such.

Wouldn't be feasible nor sane to cut up a frame that costs around €5000.

Seems trivial to detect now though. It's no problem to just tear down the bikes of the first X finishers to look for mechanical aids. Detecting doping reliably is much trickier.

edit: I think most high level bikes use carbon fibre frames? You could probably just use x-ray or ultrasound imaging to look for anything suspicious in the frame.

Perhaps implement something similar to the parc ferme rules in F1? Where the winning cars and impounded after the race for detailed inspection and measurements by the stewards to ensure that they comply with the thousands of regulations?

Drivers have been disqualified in the past for a spoiler or brake caliper measurement that are millimetres out, and I remember Daniel Ricciardo was stripped of his podium here in Australia a couple of years back when his fuel flow regulator was found to have a flow rate that was a few mils out.

Yeah this is quite common in most high level forms of motorsport I think. There is often a pre-race inspection for all entries and then the top 3 finishers are gone over with a fine tooth comb.

I think at this point the UCI do always inspect the winner's bike after each stage. Here's a scenario where a rider could avoid most scrutiny and get away with it....

Say a rider doesn't finish in the top 5 for any early stages but stays near the top of the pack time-wise. Meanwhile they are conserving energy e.g. through use of a motor during mountain stages. Then at the end, stop using the motor and have fresh legs because you haven't been working as hard as everyone else, and experience a miraculous rise in the standings in the last couple stages and clinch the GC win?

Although if you take the '15 TDF as an example, I think it was Froome was right up top of the standings for a huge chunk of the race. So no doubt his bike was inspected many time. Generally that's how it plays out, there's rarely a dark horse that shows up right at the end.

Yes. Also keep in mind that stage races are very much a team effort. The winner can derive great benefit from teammates having motors while he himself stays "clean".

You're right, very good point.

Parc ferme is practical when you have 20 racers at a purpose-built track, but a logistical nightmare when you have 200 racers going between rural villages.

The UCI already impounds bicycles for testing after races, in the same ways as anti-doping controls are applied.

What the hell? That's amazing stuff. I never knew they inspected the cars that thoroughly!

It's quite common to switch bike with one from a support car during a stage (Due to mechanical faults or otherwise). This could make it tougher.

There's no reason the team car has to retrieve bikes swapped out.

No reason except it being a $15,000 bike, personalized and tuned? Or over $50,000 if it's fitted with one of these engines, apparently.

They're not going to trust someone else to pick it up, even if it's a completely honest bike.

I don't speak french, but in the video in the article they show several cyclists changing bikes for no apparent reason. I'm guessing that the film makers theory is that they're switching bikes to pass inspection after finishing the race, that's at least the suspicion I get when watching it.

I think switching bikes during the race should be banned. Fixing a flat tire, a malfunctioning chain or similar can be allowed, but if your bike breaks beyond repair that should be the end of the race. Ask your manufacturer for better quality next time.

There are reasons someone might switch bikes seemingly for no reason. This bike is geared for this section of the course, that bike is geared for the next section, etc. Chain is getting loose, and instead of taking two minutes to switch chains, they take 30 seconds to switch bikes. Maybe the tires are a different compound. It could be cheating, but it could be a variety of other reasons as well.

I do agree with "if the bike breaks, you're done". Most racing is done this way, with a limited amount of things you're allowed to fix before you have to call it a day. I don't watch Formula racing but I used to watch NASCAR and they're allowed a backup car if they trash theirs during practice or qualifying, but not on race day.

The three weeks Grand Tours have nearly as many stages each as a full formula one season has race days. Asking to do a grande boucle without spares would be like asking formula one to go a whole season on a single set of tires - both would be perfectly possible with some adoption of hardware and tactics, but both would completely change the nature of the events.

While promoting equipment durability is a reasonable goal (and has been a cornerstone of competitive cycling during the early years), adding equipment damage DNF to the already rampant injury DNF would bring grand tours close enough last-man-standing events and make them so unpredictable that the semi-random "survivors" would be faceless nobodies to the audience. This is not how business is done in spectator sports.

Besides, any restrictions of technical support just add more rules to break. Cycling has already been through all of that. In that famous event, Eugène Christophe was penalized because someone operated the bellows while he fixed his fork at a roadside blacksmith's shop. Much drama happened over questions like wether a rider drank water from a hose coming from a pump not operated by himself or did some teammates maybe secretly switch spare parts. Is that really a line that is easier to draw and monitor than a dead simple "only human powered propulsion" rule? Finding secret motors is a much simpler problem.

They could easily trade off at the beginning and ends of stages. Start the new day with the fresh bike. It's switching during the actual race that is very surprising to me that it's still allowed. Motorsports let them switch cars between races, and the Tour is hardly one single race. Like you said, it's basically an entire race season, just condensed to "stages".

Restricting them to one bike per stage but letting them switch tires and chains is right in line with other sports, and wouldn't allow for any more cheating than there already is and would be super easy to enforce, especially when these days the entire race is monitored by officials. It's not 1913 anymore.

If the bike breaks mid stage, you either switch or you are DNF.

Except when you allow riders who did not finish one stage to continue on the next, which would be totally ridiculous in an endurance event. In that sense, The Tour very much _is_ a single race (for the rider, not for the bike(s)).

Okay, so then allow for a bike switch if the bike breaks, as judged by a race official. One bike per stage doesn't seem like it would put too much strain on the hardware compared to one bike per year. Surely it would be possible to build bikes at a high enough quality that the number of DNFs would be so incredibly low as to be negligible.

I love these Internet arguments that are like "okay, we have to argue and nitpick until we come to an agreement, we are obviously authorities on the matter and now the rules will have to change IRL."

Imagine the existing rule was "one bike per stage". What would the arguments in favor of switching to "unlimited bikes per stage" be? And what would be the arguments in favor of keeping the existing rule? I mean, at some NASCAR races only 50% of the starting cars actually finish. Why shouldn't they allow drivers to grab a backup car and keep racing? Does the 24 Hours of Le Mans (another endurance race) allow for backup cars?

What's so bad about DNFs for equipment failures? Surely the bikes are a major component to the TDF, otherwise it would be a foot race.

> Okay, so then allow for a bike switch if the bike breaks, as judged by a race official.

It's a race. The entire point of switching bikes is that swapping bikes has less impact on the athletic comparison than a lengthy repair and waiting for an official would defeat that. Besides, if you have a race official at hand, you might just give the old bike into his custody for engine detection, defeating the purpose of the maybe-no-swap rule.

The entire point of not swapping bikes would be that it could make engine cheating detection slightly easier. But that is far from necessary, developing reliable procedures for traceable bike swaps is far from impossible.

The entire NASCAR comparison is off anyways. Performance bikes don't really suffer much linear attrition over the course of a race. Even over three weeks of TdF, the distance ridden there is just within the typical service life of the most short-lived expendable part, which happens to be the chain and not the tires. Breakage within a race is therefore entirely stochastical, mostly getting a piece of gravel in the wrong spot, both for chain and for tires. Motor racing, on the other hand seems to be full of trade-offs between deterioration and performance, just look at tire consumption. And where motor racing is dominated by massive technology budget differences between teams, in cycling all participants in a single race have pretty much the same level of support: ranging from none at all on the lower levels of amateur racing to the full set of neutral support vehicles plus two cars per team at the high end.

> What's so bad about DNFs for equipment failures?

Stage races. DNF one stage means DNF for the whole set of stages. That's the entire point of an endurance sport. I suppose that in NASCAR, drivers who DNF for technical reasons in the first race don't have to wait for the next season to be allowed to start again? It's just no valid comparison.

You wouldn't look at the finishers on a stage. Those guys are the sprinters and prima donnas, they shine in the very last little bit of the race.

Cycling is a team sport, and the other riders on the team are tasked with taking the sprinter to the sprint by riding in the wind for them.

Bikes are regularly inspected to check for mechanical doping and to ensure compliance with the regulations. The rules governing racing bicycles are remarkably complex and strict. Riders have been disqualified from races just for having their saddle at the wrong angle.

Testers now have access to video endoscope equipment to inspect the inside of frame tubes and some kind of magnetometer device. Commissaires have the right to completely dismantle suspect bikes. Road racing bikes use carbon fibre for nearly all structural components, so ultrasound or x-ray would be perfectly viable.

What percentage of the bikes actually are inspected?

Harder when pro riders may change their bike mid-stage...

This came to mind for me as well. Can any engineers comment on whether current xray technology could do this without breaking the bike?

Am I the only cyclist here? I can't imagine voluntarily putting batteries in my bike on a long, mountainous stage. There's no way the batteries will last, and then I'm stuck with dead weight. And, looking through the actual documentary, I didn't see any incontrovertable thermal proof of a battery in any racer. In the guy posing for a shot, yes, but not in the cyclists laboring up the hill.

Modern race bikes are already deadweighted to make it to the minimum weight, so it's not a question of making the bike heavier.

Not deadweighted in the amounts a battery with enough energy has to weigh.

But it's conceivable they've found ways to shave the bikes weight down even lower to accommodate the battery and motor.

It will obviously pay for itself in terms of energy... in the limiting case, you could just hop in a Tesla and win the race.

Hm. I love the idea of a logic proof, but is this correct? In the limit the Tesla runs out of battery and you can't push it up the hills.

Interestingly, they race electric motorcycles at the Isle of Mann TT, and the riders all talk about how it's a different game to racing fuel-powered bikes - the bikes are capable of using up all their energy much more quickly that a fuel powered bike, so it becomes as much an efficiency trial as a race, they need to manage their energy consumption to ensure they make it to the finish line (all while still averaging over 100mph around the 40-odd mile mountain racecourse...)

I work on a team that designed two electric motorcycles for the IOM TT Zero. Yes, it's a very different game from the gas races. Aero and energy storage on board are the primary concerns - the top team for the past several years has been successful primarily by packing on ~20-30% more energy than their competitors, so that they can go faster, for longer.

The TT is really an edge case, though, since it is such a long (38mi) and high speed course.

If you've been there a while, I probably met you, or at least your colleagues - a few years back at Maker Faire (where you were showing off a yellow motorcycle, from memory R6 based?), and again at Sears Point for the first US TTxGp back in maybe 2010?

One of your guys (Richard?) offered to get me good prices on Agni motors and packs of A123 cells for $300-ish per kWHr. (I should have taken him up on that... My current ride is a probably-illegal-in-CA 125cc two stroke Cagiva Mito - which is a barrel of fun! I could easily see myself looking for 30 or 40kW of electric motor/controller/battery to jam inside it next time it needs a complete engine rebuild...)

Hmm, not us! We were there in '13 and '14, and our bike was built on a CBR1000RR chassis. I can't remember who had a yellow bike, although it sounds familiar... it may have been a bit before my time if they were talking about Agni motors.

Small world :)

I meant the limit as battery / bike -> infinity for a fixed race length, not the limit as distance goes to infinity. In the latter case, the human dies as surely as the car. The race stages are only about 200k, which is no problem for the car, especially at the relatively low speeds of the bikes.

Although I strongly agree with you, and I strongly doubt this report, the story is that they change bikes during the stage. There's no limitation on changing bikes for mechanicals or any other reason. So the hypothesis is, they don't carry the dead weight. They change to the electric bike just for the Muur von Geerardsbergen or whatever.

The key thing is being able to respond to attacks and keep a gap from forming. Often all this takes is a well-timed burst of power for a few seconds at a time. Easier said than done, but juice from a battery could easily make the difference.

The thing to understand is that often times the bikes that pros ride are below the minimum weight as set by the race. They'd be carrying dead weight either way.

Have you ever used an electric assist? a 50Wh battery weighs very little[1], the motors are similarly light, even by road-bike standards. Remember that there is a minimum weight, so you have a small amount of deadweight to play around with as well.

That would give a pro biker a 10%[2] increase in power usable over 1 hour of the stage. It would make the uphill parts way better while negligibly affecting flat terrain and downhill.

1: Maybe 300g for such a battery were it lithium polymer. Lithium primary cells can be even lighter.

2: Or 5% increase in power for 2h, &ct.

Ive some of these tube-size assists are 100 watts. That could be as much 30% in sustained riding. They were designed to provide half the power for commuters.

indeed; my point was that even a modest amount of power would clearly be a net-advantage versus no assist, despite the weight.

I've got about 150 Watt Hours from a ~900g battery on my cheater bike. (link below)

I dunno how much ballast a really lightly built race bike has to carry these days, but even a quarter of that energy would likely make a dramatic difference - at 25W of assistance (which is something like 10% of a rider's total long-term output) a battery 1/4 the size/weight of mine would provide 90mins of assistance. Would that be "worth" 250 odd grams (plus motor and controller as well...)

http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__21384__ZIPPY_Comp...

Why do you need a cheater bike?

To clarify, my cheater bike" is a $50 eBay 2nd hand mountain bike that I use to commute to work - not something I ride dressed in lycra pretending to be faster than other people... I call it my "cheater bike", 'cause that what it _feels_ like riding it up hills... It makes me laugh everytime I ride it.

(I do _occasionally_ enjoy passing mamils on bikes that weigh less then their brekfast going uphill on my way to work.)

Every spandex rider you pass is pretending?

Nope - that was aimed at me not them - but I'm happy to let the stereotype burn stand ;-)

I will say to a first approximation, 100% of the RadioShack lycra liveried carbon fibre Trek riders I see riding through Sydney traffic on a weekday morning are _not_ Lance Armstrong class riders.

(Not any more than I'm a Carl Fogarty or Troy Bayliss class motorcycle racer when I put my racing leathers on and fire up my Ducati Monster...).

It's mostly posing and toys, with an unhealthy dose of brand snobbery and wealth signalling (and being brutally honest, I'm guilty of a little bit of both of those myself - no matter how much I protest that "My Ducati is just a fun toy! I;m not a brand conscious poser! Not like those _other_ Ducati riders...")

Well, even among serious hobbyist cyclists, very very few of them are or can be fit for world class pro cycling. Still, it's perfectly okay to use whatever clothes and bikes they enjoy, and it has nothing to do with pretending to be world class.

I imagine a nice lycra suit would actually be comfortable. I don't know, I go with jeans and a T-shirt (when the weather is warm enough for that) but proper cycling wear should help with chafing down there as well as stopping your clothes from dripping sweat while still keeping you warm enough for when you're starting to get exhausted or the weather gets chilly. These problems exist even for non-sporty people cycling to work as long as they ride fast enough for their bodies and have a long enough commute...

Toys? I guess. I would say all hobby equipment is toys.

A little off topic, but what's cycling like there?

From what I've heard (never been there) Australia is about as close as it gets to the perfect society... except they hate cyclists like the plague?

> Australia ... the perfect society

Hahaha

I commute to work on an e-bike in Melbourne. My route is mostly on trails and roads with dedicated bike lanes, so its pretty easy going. The hate towards cyclists might be a bit overstated. Some of it is justified as cyclists will often break road rules, I usually see multiple cyclists run red lights every day. Ive seen more aggression coming from cyclists then I have seen from drivers aimed at cyclists, but obviously aggressive drivers are much more dangerous than aggressive cyclists.

What a weird implication that you need to be the best to use good gear.

The pro-style clothing isn't posing or brand snobbery. Jeans are way too hot, cotton clothes get uncomfortably sticky from sweat way too fast and let cold wind go through them. Proper bike clothes allow me to feel comfortable for a long time and won't get me sick.

As for a good bike, it's just a better experience. I've owned a bunch of different bikes, starting with a old soviet fixed-gear Školnik, and ending with my current Trek road bike with fancy gear. Everything about riding the Trek is better than any of my older bikes. The gears change in a smoother fashion, I can roll on without cycling for much longer, and the effort-to-speed ratio is much better, allowing me to reach way higher speeds than ever before.

Sure, but I see guys riding to work in "pro style clothing" with Rabobank and RadioShack logos all over them. My cynicism makes it hard for me to come up with justifications for that which are not super easy to make fun of...

I get the "owning nice toys" thing - I even get the guys who are 20kg overweight spending $5k+ to get a bike that's 2kg lighter than a bike that costs 20% of that. To me though, it starts seeming weird when they do that while dressed up in sponsor logos for companies that sometimes don't even exist in this country...

(And it's not just lycra wearing mamils either, I don't get the motorcycle riders who paint Repsol livery on their Honda or Aruba or Xerox logos on their Ducati...)

Ah, you're talking about sponsor logos. I didn't get that at first. The only thing I know about RadioShack is that it's a store chain. I assumed they sell some rebranded bike clothes. Having sponsor logos on you that weren't put there by the clothing store seems indeed a bit quirky. I haven't seen that myself.

Does your cynicism carry over into teamwear for all sports? Baseball hats? Logowear in general? None of these people are pretending they are linebackers and point guards.

One thing you may not know is that logowear is like 90% of available men's cycling gear. There's an element of market failure.

Yeah, it does - and hypocritically so. I'm currently wearing a tshirt with a Kees Van Der Westen Speedster logo on it (an espresso machine I covet badly, but am not prepared to spend $10k+ to own). I own and wear various motorcycle branded tshirts and coffee brand tshirts, as well as many many band and musician merch tshirts. So I;m just as guilty of "making a staement" with what I choose to wear. But, of course, _my_ choices are all rational and understandable. Those _other_ guys who dress up like Lance Armstrong while riding to work are _clearly_ worthy of my derision, right? ;-)

Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose? Why not ride a scooter?

Not aimed at you personally, but in my commute I'm not happy with all these motorized bicycles on the bike lane nowadays. They're usually ridden by people who don't race seriously, and are now riding 30+ km/h, but doing it as though they're still going 15 km/h: not looking behind them before passing or turning, immediately ringing their bell if you're in front of them, without first looking if maybe there's a reason why you're slowing down, not keeping distance. One slammed into me when I stopped to yield for traffic. Yield? Why would one yield?

Surely the purpose is to get to work. The motor certainly doesn't defeat that.

I also ride motorcycles, but the bicycle I can ride int the lobby and take up the lift to the office - it's quicker door-to-door (over 8km) than the motorcycle, which I sometimes get to park close by but if I don't come in early I end up parking a few blocks away (or _gasp_ paying for parking).

I;m with you on the dangers of people who don't have good situational awareness zooming around on electric bikes - but I think I'm pretty good there, you don't survive 25 years as a motorcyclist doing 15-20k miles a year without being pretty good at knowing what's going on around you and riding accordingly...

Another point, I know a lot of commuter bicycle riders, and some of _them_ think the skinny-wheeled-carbon-frame crowd doing 30+kmh in bike lanes should GTFO as well... (And I've got motorcycle friends who reckon the lycra-crowd should stay off the country backroads doing 50kmh when they want to zoom past at twice the speed limit... People, huh?)

(Also, my cheater bike is _way_ cheaper than a scooter, it's a $50 eBay mountain bike with ~$130 worth of Chinese hubmotor/controller/stuff, and a $70 battery. And crucially, I can ride the cheater bike home from the pub after a few beers... )

It's not so much a comment on their situational awareness, it's that they're riding one vehicle with the style of another. It's behavior that would probably be harmless if they were going half the speed.

If you drive a car as though it is a motorcycle, you're also disrupting traffic and creating danger.

Your cheater-bike-build sounds pretty interesting. Did you describe the build-process in detail somewhere? Or would you care to write it up?

It was a pretty complex and sophisticated process.

First you need to get borderline drunk and start browsing AliExpress late one night, then forget all about it by morning. A few months later a bike wheel with a hub motor and controller unexpectedly show up by courier at work. This reminds you why you bought that lipo battery months back thats way too big for any of your quadcopters. Then you spend an hour or two the next Saturday afternoon bolting the wheel and ziptieing the wiring and controller onto the $50 eBay mountain bike you bought a few years back when you decided it was "time to get fit" - which had been sitting in the garage ever since after having been ridden only once or twice. You then notice the battery is an _almost_perfect fit into the drink holder, and you can make it into a perfect fit but putting the battery into a stubby holder! Win! A bit of work with the soldering iron having robbed connectors and heatshrink from the quadcopter parts bin, and it's ready to go. You then hop onto the bike and cruise up all the nearby hills grinning like a loon and laughing out loud.

Im pretty sure that covers all the important steps. If you need me to check my notes about exactly what you should be drinking to get the right sort of AliExpress ordering buzz going, let me know - it was _probably_ bourbon ;-)

> And crucially, I can ride the cheater bike home from the pub after a few beers...

Not in the UK, you can't. Drunk in charge of a vehicle, no matter that the vehicle is just a bicycle.

In Germany the same.

If you are caught drunk (over the legal limit) on a bicycle, they will remove your _car_ driving license ( if you have one) and you either the let the bike there and call a cab or you have to walk with the bike home. Of course, next day you need to pay them a visit to pick the driving license :).

Yeah - technically it's true here as well. Practically, short of mowing down a pedestrian in front of a cop (or some other spectacularly provocative bad behaviour), the odds of getting breath tested while riding a bicycle are close enough to zero to make no difference. (Having said that, I once worked with a guy who lost his driving license after getting caught while riding a horse home from the pub - he was the kind of angry mouthy guy who was gonna end up like that somehow anyway, I suspect he worked quite vigorously at getting the cop worked up and angry enough to bother doing it...)

A scooter's harder to park. And depending on how long your commute is, half-cycling might be the right amount of workout/time where cycling the whole way would be too much. (I sometimes take the train halfway to work and cycle the rest of the way or vice versa).

The dude who was cruising up the hill without standing on his pedals seemed pretty obviously using an assist.

Standing on pedals is actually less efficient than remaining on the saddle. You break out of the optimum cadence.

However it does shift the work to different muscles which is why some riders stand for particular stretches of hill prior to a seated sprint.

With the minimum weight requirements in bikes they are having to add weight inside the frame to meet the minimum. Adding a battery + motor that provides even 20W of assist is a huge gain for a bike that still only hits the minimum weight.

They can easily switch bikes pretending that they have a flat tire, or any other issue. IIRC suspects of using batteries have also been seen to switch bikes at suspicious moments.

The maths doesn't work like that. Weight is actually not a huge factor in cycling performance because you mostly go horizontally. Top athletes only go for super-light bikes because they need every tiny advantage they can get.

Adding a battery will increase the weight a bit, but the extra power from the battery more than makes up for it. Let's do some massively oversimplified maths:

A lithium ion battery might have an energy density of 0.5 MJ/kg. A typical insane Tour de France climb might be 2000m. To lift itself that high, the battery-motor system needs to only be (20009.81/500000) ~= 4% efficient!

The actual efficiency will be a lot* higher than that. Usually over 50%, so adding a battery is definitely worth it.

(I haven't mentioned the weight of the motor, which is usually more than the battery - at least on conventional e-bikes, but it still works out as being definitely worth adding.)

IMR 18650s are very light, will fit in pretty any much tube on a bike, potentially even inside a tyre on a tubeless job, and will push 80A for 120 seconds, which is a crap-tonne of power.

Having a battery assist is the difference between working hard for an entire hill climb, or being able to do 30 seconds on 30 seconds off and fartlek your way up the hill - which is the difference between winning and losing.

For the mass of 10 cells (500g) you can get 25aH - which works out as about 60W for an hour at 2.5v - which is enough to save you 10% of your energy expenditure over a one hour race if you're going hell for leather - which is still the difference between winning and losing.

Amazingly creative. At some point they will be wearing bike jerseys that are a coil of conductors and their team will follow behind in the chase car with a giant magnet to repulse them forward :-).

Shhh ...

Let's be clear. This is 100% cheating in races and can not be condoned. Otoh, I don't get the outrage by someone like Eddy Merckx, calling for a lifelong ban on Femke Van Den Driessche , the young female cyclist that was found to have a bike with an seatpost motor in her materials stand. You have to realize Merckx himself was caught several times on doping, receiving only mild punishments, and also one of those ex-racers sticking 100% to the sport's traditional muerta on the subject. At least these motors are not actively preying on the health of the riders.

I assume that most people would feel that a motor in a manual bicycle is far more of an egregious rule-break than performance enhancing drugs, which are an aspect of every pro sport in the world.

That video of her bike doing donuts on its own makes a complete mockery of the sport.

I don't know if she should be banned for life, but certainly her career needs to be affected. 3 year ban or something.

I must be out of touch for sure. For me 'performance enhancing drugs' are not to be accepted as just 'an aspect of pro-sport'. Ruining (young) people's health, on top of making it near impossible for honest athletes to compete, makes drugs far more egregious than material cheats.

Absolutely, I don't understand how GP can causally accept how drugs damage thousands of people's health while harshly criticizing a different form of cheating which happens to use a different substrate than human flesh.

It's not about the health impact, it's about the idea that PEDs exist in every sport and are very well known and monitored for, so it's not as scandalous. Yes, it has a major health impact that trickles down to the youth participants and ruins lives, no one is debating that. The discussion is how big of a scandal it is.

Barry Bonds used steroids to hit some home runs, and he got an asterisk on his record. The 1919 Black Sox Scandal participants threw some games to make money and received lifelong suspensions from baseball and changed the history and rules of baseball forever because it made a mockery of the sport. Same thing with Pete Rose, he made a mockery of the sport. Bonds is currently a hitting coach for the Marlins, while Rose is doing commercials since he was banned for life in 1989.

Steroid and other PEDs are terrible and have awful impacts on the users health and are a bad example for kids, but their effects are still in line with the sports. What you get is a bit of a stronger cyclist, but still a cyclist. With a motor, you're making a mockery of the sport. It's not cycling anymore, it's now a motorsport. You're not participating in the sport anymore.

There are plenty of discussions that revolve around how bad PEDs are. This isn't one of them. This discussion is about how cheating using PEDs is different from cheating by removing yourself from the nature of the sport altogether.

You have to also remember that she didn't actually use the bike either, it was one of her spares.

I think the real issue here is that it ceases to be cycling and becomes motorcycling.

I'm not sure why the focus is on the motors. They can be tiny and well hidden, but what about the batteries ? They are bound to be hidden in the hollow tubing. Why don't they just require a small hole where they can poke in a stick to verify the tubes are hollow ? A simple weight check would also suffice. The bike has a known legal weight, oh, suddenly its 3 kilos heavier...

> The bike has a known legal weight, oh, suddenly its 3 kilos heavier...

Part of the issue is that bikes have a minimum weight, but with modern materials it's quite easy to go below that minimum. So they can cover the added weight of the motor and batteries by cutting elsewhere.

moreover, it's not rare when the bikes carry additional weight to be UCI-legal in terms of minimum weight.

There is a clear evidence from Vuleta 2014

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynLMfzLTc8M

The cyclosport officials intentionally hide/enable the problem for years.

That is in no way "clear evidence", the opinions of all the Youtube commenters notwithstanding. It can just as well be explained by the rotation of the rear wheel, see for example https://youtu.be/aN7HjwZI-k0?t=32.

It looks like the bike comes to a rest with the tire in contact with the road, presumably stopping the rotation of the wheel. Then when the cyclist lets go of the bike it takes off.

Duuuudes, chill out! I just rebuilt my bottom bracket the other day and forgot to grease it.

And yet somehow you were faster for it, hmm...

Seriously, though, in the image, the seat tube temperature seems to peak several inches above the bottom bracket. The rear stays are cold.

For the big races, why don't they embargo the bikes prior to the race? Then xray them at random. Beginning of the day the rider pics up the bike, turn it in at night. The mechanic can work on it, whatever, in a special shop. Especially for the one day races. I can see how this would be difficult with multi-day races, but something like this should be feasible elsewhere.

I imagined a mandatory thorough backscatter scanning through a special path just before starting point on the race day.

That could work. As the bike is going up to the start house, they have to put it through the backscatter machine. Just having it there, and saying they're going to randomly choose and at least 60% of the teams will have to go through it, could be a powerful deterrent. Also, I think they should up the penalty for bike doping. Lifetime ban for having a motor in your bike.

It's logistically very difficult. All ProTour riders will have at least one spare bike. The teams will also have at least 20 spare wheelsets available. For a typical one-day like the Paris-Roubaix, that means at least 400 bikes and a thousand spare wheels. These bikes and wheels all need to be checked and maintained before every day of racing.

Cycle races often start and finish in small towns, so the teams may have to stay in hotels some distance from the course. It would be impractical to find a suitable building for parc ferme at most races and it would be costly to erect temporary facilities.

The professional racing calendar is extremely busy, so a team mechanic may be travelling continuously from late January to early December. There simply isn't the time available for a parc ferme.

I think the current strategy is perfectly satisfactory. Riders are immediately intercepted after the finish line. The race leaders and some randomly selected riders will have their equipment inspected, in the same way that they are tested for doping.

I don't see a problem with not testing the wheels - you can't really hide batteries inside the tube.

What's with all the spiel, personalities, politics, scenery, etc. Just show us the IR images!

This is the most mind-boggling cheating scandal ever. It jiggles my engineering nerves in place I didn't know was possible.

Racers are willing to put their health at risk with various performance enhancing drugs and procedures, putting a motor on their bike seems to pale in comparison.

Things people will do for money. You can write a book on it.

That would sell really well.

Speaking of engineering, why not either place the motor in the seat/seat-post itself which would obscure those infrared cameras (as the heat would look natural) or insulate the area around the motor and let the heat exhaust through the seat which would accomplish the same thing? Maybe they didn't think someone would bring an infrared camera....

If I were a competitor, who wanted an honest race, is there anything my team could do to neutralize either of these techniques?

You're making me imagine a Mario Kart style escalation of cheating and anti-cheating techniques.

Maybe an EMP equipped tortoise shell would do the trick!

NY Times just published an article on the subject:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/19/sports/cycling/with-a-disc...

If these bikers lost these races, and i am left to assume they did since the scandal hasn't boiled over yet, i think they can safely pack it in. Losing a race you cheated in is about as low as i can imagine this getting.

Obviously there is still a significant desire to finish higher even you don't finish first.

Nearly all of the riders in the pro tour lose for the exact same reason that nearly all of the players in a football match don’t score a goal.

Wow, people are really serious about those Strava KOMs.

For those you just need a car.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tn-strava-dopers-20160...

What makes cycling so particularly attractive to cheating? Or is cheating in cycling just getting more publicity than in other sports?

It's not just cycling. Boxing, baseball, tennis they are all cheating, theres million dollar incentives for these athletes too

Exactly. My impression is that a large percentage of top performing athletes are "enhanced" in some form or another.

I think it's the nature of the cheating her that is getting a lot of attention. From TFA "Despite more suspicious evidence occasionally floating to the surface, moto-doping seemed like a fairly improbable boogeyman, something that was too outrageous and silly for anyone to actually try. "

Most professional athletes are doing everything they can to get ahead, and cycling is no exception.

That said, there are pretty amazing stories about cyclists cheating - perhaps because the sport is so grueling that small advantages can really translate to substantial gains. One of my favorites for the Tour de France was cyclists being pulled by cars attached by fishing line to a piece of cork held in the mouth!

WTF? Who did that and when?

I'm not really finding any primary sources, but there is a lot of unsourced blogs talking about it. Allegedly it was Hippolyte Aucouturier in the 1904 Tour de France, which apparently was so rife with cheating that it almost got canceled.

http://www.bikeroar.com/articles/the-4-greatest-bicycle-chea...

Oh, OK. I was imagining something like that happening more recently and couldn't quite believe it.

At the highest levels of every type of professional sports, competitors are working hard to seek an edge. Some of those edges are legitimate and "in-bounds" (training harder/smarter/better equipment within the rules); others are outside the bounds.

I'd bet there's not a single star athlete in any sport that hasn't used performance enhancing drugs in some way. Test doesn't just make your muscles grow; it allows you to train harder and recover faster. The benefits are obvious. Stars have been caught in nearly every single sport you can think of -- football, baseball, track, cycling, distance running, sprinting, swimming, weightlifting, bodybuilding (well, they mostly don't bother testing), etc. Even movie stars are doing them (see eg Hugh Jackman jumping 20 lbs lean muscle mass in 6 months in his 40s to play Wolverine.)

Where stars aren't getting caught testing is lax or the drugs have outrun the testing regimes (basketball, crossfit, tennis).

In the year 2016, believing that the best athletes aren't using the same drugs as everyone else requires willful suspension of disbelief. After all, look at what they did for eg Barry Bonds -- they turned a clear hall of fame player into probably the best to ever play baseball. Every star athlete, and they tend to be ultra competitive, wants the same thing.

What's more, anabolic steroid use causes long term changes to muscle by increasing number of myonuclei (this also happens with natural training, but less effectively). Myonuclei are not lost even after long term muscle atrophy, so it's much easier to regain lost muscle size ("muscle memory"). You keep the benefits long after your cheating has become impossible to prove.

AAS increase myonuclei count:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4160183/

Myonuclei retained during muscle atrophy (animal study, but "muscle memory" is well established in humans too):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2930527/

There's also the phenomenon whereby cutting corners is more desirable if you feel that it is prevalent. Cheaters beget cheaters, and you've got a feedback loop.

Name a professional sport with lots of money involved that hasn't been heavily involved with cheating or corruption in the last 2 decades.

Seems to me that cycling has gotten so competitive that virtually all of the top performers are on some sort of drugs, like it's a culture there. If everyone is mostly clean and one guy is using special drugs, than it's easy to say that the one guy is a cheating asshole. But if everybody is using drugs and you basically have to to be competitive, then it's harder to judge.

Cycling has actually gotten cleaned up a lot lately. There are various teams with 'no needles' policies, and very strict monitoring of what people are ingesting in terms of vitamins and so forth.

Most sports are 'very competitive'. That's the point.

Its getting more press because the other leagues are suppressing it. It is not hard too believe that there is an immense amount of PED use in NFL (way too much money on the line) and probably the NBA and Soccer.

The NFL really should have some kind of amnesty about past PED use so that sports doctors can share what they've learned with the broader medical community. It's actually incredible how NFL players can bounce back from serious injuries. Sharing those secrets could really help a lot of people.

Because it is one of the most difficult sports, if not the most difficult one. There are not many others, where you race 4 to 7 hours 6 days a week (and besides the 3 main tours, you are engaged in a gazillion of one-week tours, 3-days races, one-day classics, etc., teams run several races happening at the same time in different part of world, even second or third categories teams).

Another parameter is that it is probably the sport where it is harder to make a difference, because of the importance of drafting. Leaving the protection from the wind at fair speed is a bit like hitting a wall, it requires an amazing amount of energy compared to staying in the group. But if you ever want to win, at some point...

Part of it could be accessibility. The body shape required to be a top cyclist isn't particularly unusual. Plenty of people could be top cyclists if they had the endurance.

After many years of training cheating becomes more attractive than admitting your natural endurance limit is just too low.

I've been following this one on the cycling blogs, and I have a fairly cynical take on it:

* They didn't actually name anyone.

* They didn't catch anyone with a motor, red handed.

* They did, however, manage to produce another 'cycling is dirty' narrative.

Pretty useless, IMO.

Well except there's a video of someone's bike skidding around on its own on the site. So the motors do exist in the sport...

Video is old and has been debunked.

The only debunking I've seen is putting a spinning tire down in optimal conditions, which of course has it spinning like it did in the video. The video has the bike bouncing off the ground several times and coming to a complete stop on the ground in the rider's hands, and then him letting go and it spinning away. At that point, the tire should have stopped all of it's rotational inertia.

It's not like they're going slow in those races - the wheel probably had a lot of momentum.

In any event, reposting an old video, with a couple of grainy shots of unidentified riders whose bikes were not subsequently checked counts more as "casting aspersions" rather than "proof" in my book.

I wouldn't be entirely surprised if someone somewhere was cheating, but I've come to dislike these kinds of hit pieces.

Well obviously no one is being disqualified on this video alone. The idea is to draw attention to what could be a real issue.

But calling it debunked because of another video that is just as dubious seems a little like hand-waving. What's happening is that people are trying to get the officials to look into the idea that there may be tiny hidden motors in some bikes. And what you're doing seems like you're trying to avoid that from happening.

People have been talking about this issue for a while in the cycling community. That's why they're doing tests. I'm more than happy for them to do more tests, too, so... no, i'm not against that, at all.

What I don't like are 'accusations' that aren't aimed at anyone and so just kind of sit there.

Also, when you see that the Corriere della Sera barely covers bike racing, but then splashes out on big things like this, it's pretty grating. It's like bike racing is only important when we're talking about doping or cheating or something.

It's a sport. So the rules are the rules. Bringing a set of brass knuckles to a boxing match is just taking advantage of better equipment, but of course the people running the sport of boxing can define what's allowed and what's not. It might be interesting to have an unlimited class, whatever that would mean for cycling, but the sport of pro cycling gets to define what a legal bike for pro racing is, end of argument.

Seems a simple answer to me - require every rider to have 3 - 5 uniquely identifiable bikes.

Require that all rider's bikes - irrespective of position, etc. be kept by the race organiser at the end of the day. Randomly select bikes for testing with x-ray/millimeter rays, electromagnetic sensors, and even destructive testing.

An extended "post race parc fermé" if you will...

It would be more interesting if it was legal with some reasonable limitations. It could be one more reason for boosting the battery technology.

I think they should allow it, but only with capacitors that are shorted prior to start. This way, it can only be used to improve efficiency.

If the people making the regulations were interested in efficiency, everyone would be racing in a fully covered recumbent bike.

(They don't, because the regulations don't allow it.)

Yet they allow advanced alloys and other materials. There's obviously a balance. This is typical in racing.

Yes. One guiding principle of the regulations seems to be that they have to produce a bike that looks `normal' on TV.

Nah, the market is such so much smaller than for phones (and even cars).

This is interesting yeah, put an upper weight limit on the bike and see how fast and long a human can go with only 10kg of technology.

What I don't understand is, how is neodymium undetectable? Wouldn't they notice the unusually strong magnetic force?

I don't know the answer. But my first guess is that (to a first approximation) a magnet inside a metal box does not create a magnetic field outside of that box [1]. Of course this depends on the material of the tube.

[1] http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/38759/does-farada...

A magnet inside a ferromagnetic box. The box material has to have a high permeability to shield an enclosed magnet from external detection.

You can think of permeability in this instance as the ability to contain a magnetic field. As long as the shielding material doesn't saturate (too much magnetic flux), the field from an enclosed magnet can be confined within the enclosing material. No external detectable field.

Why not encourage this? F1 racing fueled innovation in this manner before they went crazy with engineering restrictions

Have you heard of Group B?

That's the story of why racing today has heavy regulations.

I wanna learn more and wikipedia isn't very helpful; any places I should read?

"Too Fast To Race" is a great documentary on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imXk8u-reUQ

I believe he is referring this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_B

You mean the very best thing that ever happened in rally sport? My first memory of watching TV was following WRC season 85 while holding in my 6 year old hands model of Ari Vananens Peugeot 205.

A combination of FLIR and homologation could go a long way to solve this problem. FLIR seems like an excellent start.

Later in the video it shows electromagnets that don't really generate heat the same way the motors do.

Yeah, that's the FLIR part, but homologation could help with the "batteries in the seat stays" thing and other structural modifications. To be sure, homologation doesn't necessarily prohibit modification, and these frames typically have custom dimensions to suit the rider, so maybe x-rays could also be thrown into the mix.

It's nice that after all these years racing sports still come up with innovations that can help "regular" people.

Now let's split the bike racing into assisted and unassisted ones to let the technology develop, and the "pure" racing continue.

No one wants to watch motorized bike races.

The investigation's video is also available (in French):

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4543y2_video-un-moteur-dan...

With a fan and some aerogel insulation, it should be possible to avoid a thermal sig.

cycling seems to always be mired in scandal. why is this the case?

Because prestige is given to winners. There's nothing special about cycling.

It's had its troubles, but there does also seem to be a tendency for the media to focus on it.

Look at FIFA in soccer - it's completely rotten - and yet we're back to 'those cyclists...'.

Also: if you consider the money in cycling, which is pretty modest, compared with soccer or US sports... you're delusional if you think that cycling is dirtier.

If other sports , like football/soccer were under the same surveillance as cycling, the results probably would be similar, but it's easier to go on the same people.

Seems carrying the weight of the batteries and motor would be totally counter productive. Perhaps they should pressurize the bike frame with air and then run that through a muffled impeller connected to the gear somehow :shrug:

In pro races bikes have a minimum weight and it's quite easy to make a bike under that weight using modern materials. So you just make a really light bike and have the batteries and motor make up the difference.

I'm starting to think that all major sports are fake.

Enjoy Wrestling, at least they admit it now.

Though, not quite sure whether doping (mechanical or otherwise) counts as fake. It's just that the de facto regulations they abide by are different than the de jure regulations.

This makes italian cold fusion research doubly suspicious

How is it at all related?

Look up, I think you'll see @awinter-py's joke passing over your head :D

All I see are the FBI planes taking my portrait :( I can't tell what's real and what's dystopian any more.

Could you disable such motors with an EMP or so?

Suddenly, steroids don't seem so bad.

I don't know about that. One is ruining your body to win and the other is just cheating.

In related news Hebrew University researchers unveil a sarcasm detector [2010]

http://m.jpost.com/Health-and-Sci-Tech/Internet-And-Technolo...

No, it doesn't.

I have to agree with you here. The thermal camera footage they did show was just shockingly weak. They had one instance where there was higher than average temperatures coming off of the cogset. Which coincidentally enough is a rotating joint with the weight of a grown man pressing down on it for an entire race. Seeing heat here is not surprising.

Apparently you missed the part where they have this footage for just 2 racers out of an entire peloton.

Seems like that could just be because they need greased and/or aligned.

It could be that. It could be something else. That's why the questions are being asked instead of people being disqualified at this point.

Although I would really doubt any professional cyclist would have an ungreased, misaligned hub and not know it or not trade it out for a bike in better repair.

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