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Comment by tetraodonpuffer | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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?

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.

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