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Comment by flosstop | Hacker News Reader

They have moved on from pharmaceutical doping due to the extensive testing to what is referred to as "mechanical doping". Motors are hidden in hubs/frames and the organisation is busy doing everything they can to pretend that it isn't a problem.

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They do systematic checks for the winner, whoever has suspicious performance jumps one day, as well as random racers. They do take it very seriously and what you are saying is a bit far from the truth.

Some people will try, and some scandals will happen, sure. But it is not a widespread problem and is unlikely to become one.

See here, for example: https://velo.outsideonline.com/road/road-racing/tour-de-fran...

I've lost track of how many bike changes I've seen and I've only watched the first 3 days of coverage so far.

Plus if your lieutenant uses a motor in order to pull you up to the front, then your bike is clean.

Through axels have become a very convenient excuse for bike changes. Watching Cavendish have his wheels changed in one of the early stages this year was so slow. It took a guy with a drill like a minute plus to do front and rear wheels.

I just learned about through axles last fall. And narrow-wide chain rings (mountain biking). I used to keep up better with the tech changes.

I only caught the end of that wheel change when I realized the mechanic was holding a Milwaukee cordless and Bob(?) was talking about it.

We've had a handful of cases at the lower levels of the sport, but I think the scrutineering is just too strict for anyone to get away with it at the ProTour level. The UCI have got mobile x-ray facilities which they're starting to use much more rigorously.

https://www.uci.org/pressrelease/uci-reveals-technological-f...

Mechanical doping, a problem so wide-spread that only one person at the elite level has ever been found to have been doing it. To date, no one has ever provided hard evidence of another rider using a motor. I am not saying that this doesn't happen at the amateur level (it certainly does) but to imply that this is a pervasive problem in elite cycling is little more than a baseless conspiracy theory until someone shows up with some actual evidence of motors being used in major events.

Ghost in the Machine [1] is a great podcast on this topic.

[1] https://play.pocketcasts.com/discover/podcast/de6ba1d0-9132-...

Only one person has been caught. It's been a long time since I bothered to look into this, but LeMond suspected at least half a dozen people, with video evidence of varying degrees of plausibility. The thermal imaging and the fallen rider with the spinning wheels were especially damning.

But if you're analyzing old races how do you get a conviction? You can't.

> with the spinning wheels were especially damning

No it wasn't. Wheels spin through crashes all the time.

And if this is the Toms Skujins case, it spins for like 3 seconds on video after the video cuts to him. It's obvious that he just had lifted his bike up and spun the pedals to see if everything was in order before biking on. And when an alternate video later was released, this was proven to be true.

the long history of cheating at the highest levels of every sport indicates that if there is not mechanical doping in cycling, it's because the mechanical technology is not as good at hiding yet as it needs to be. We are talking about human beings here.

I really, really want someone to commercialize the mechanical doping tech they've been using. Get caught and go straight please.

Give me a bike that looks like a normal bike and gives mere mortals like me an extra 5 mph (power law makes that a lot worse for pros).

That's basically already a thing. There's a big market for older riders who want a little bit of discreet assistance on their group ride.

https://www.orbea.com/us-en/ebikes/road/gain/

To my eyes, that bike obviously has a battery in the downtube. But I'm not the average person where bikes are concerned so perhaps I should have said, "a bike that would fool other bicyclists."

Assuming the pros are cheating, the professional assistance is unlikely to be of use to a regular human. At the professional level, a 1% gain could be huge, whereas a normal rider could gain far more than that by better techniques/breathing/equipment/whatever.

It’s not 1% it’s 35 watts. Which matters a lot more when you’re a rider who can only put out 200 watts.

I found that podcast terrible. At the time I knew nothing about road cycling and that podcast left me with the impression that it's a pervasive problem and a grand conspiracy. It wasn't until I spoke about this with some real road cycling enthusiasts that I realised I had been taken in by a bullshit conspiracy theory.

Impossible to use mechanical doping now with the current inspections. Has it been used before these inspections were implemented? Very likely. An hungarian engineer developed a motor with spools in the rims and the stator in the forks. For sure at some point this offered a better risk/reward than PEDs.

Greg LeMond was one of the people calling for more scrutiny of bikes for mechanical tampering. One of the best pieces of evidence he provided were thermal cameras pointed at bikes while they were in motion. Lots of thermal blooming in places no professional bike mechanic generate a tenths that much friction.

One of the problems is that bikes can be made so light with unobtainium that there are rules in place requiring a minimum weight so that poorer teams can compete. So if you make a bike that's 10 lbs you have to stick weights into it to bring it up to spec. What else could you put in that bike besides chunks of iron pipe?

Bikes being too light and needing weight added to rich 6.8kg minimum is a tale of the past. With aero frames, disc brakes, deeper wheels and bigger cassettes most TdF bikes are way over the minimum, sometimes more than 1kg heavier.

Weight minimum has nothing to do with teams being poor, it has to do with having a safety minimum.

Really, hidden motors in the tour? That would be an interesting read.

No, not really. These motors exist, but it’s not really a thing on the Tour de France. And I only mention this race because I am not much of a devotee and don’t really follow the others, but I would expect quite a lot of noise if it were a thing in the other big races.

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