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The brilliance of cycling is that if you were to invent a cheating competition, you could never call it that because it would give away the game. You would need a pretext for rules, one that used some arbitrary but very specific set of contraints that disqualify all functionally efficient solutions outside their domain. They would enable byzantine regulations that created jobs for (pliable) authorities who outnumbered athletes, and be a constant source of subtext, scandal, misdirection, and betrayal.

To appreciate the peculiar beauty of cycling you need to understand what it is. It is not merely a sport or an athletic competition, it is itself the art of cheating.

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> To appreciate the peculiar beauty of cycling you need to understand what it is.

In the middle of nowhere, festoons are hanging over the streets of a small village. It's a long forgotten village, except for today, when for around 10 seconds, it becomes the stage of a show in which the nation's biggest hero's and antihero's participate.

The noise of the television helicopter coming closer is the sign for the butcher and the baker and their customers to leave their shops and head for the street. Here they line up next to the village's grandads and grandmothers, who are firmly holding the hands of their grandkids, equally excited, eagerly awaiting the caravane of sponsor cars and police bikes that signal the head of the race.

There is nothing quite like the vivid brush of colors of the jerseys of a peloton rustling by at 60 km/hour. The whoosh of two hundred times two 25mm rubber tubes rolling over asfalt, a peloton displacing itself through air as one giant organism, the sound of shifting gears, the shriek of someone hitting the brakes, a shout perhaps to warn for a pothole or the odd street furniture. A sunray hitting the large sunglasses covering most of the faces of the riders, the rest of which give away a familiar mix of concentration and nervousness. The same questions racing through the minds of all the riders. "Did I train enough?" "How much will I be able to suffer today?"

Vamos!! Alé alé! Cries from the spectators at the side of the road, transcending any language, the grandma and the grandkid equally loud. Support, not for a particular team, less for a particular rider. Encouragement that is as much destined for the champion, feeling the pressure, chasing a new record, as for the anonymous rider who tries to make him or herself believe that if everything falls into place, it is possible for him or her to sneak away and grab an upset victory. It has happened.

A rider at the back of the bunch, looking for distraction, his legs hurting more than they ought to, spots a kid at the side of the road and throws his bottle at her feet. Rare will be the moments in her life that she will feel equally much at the center of the world.

Ah, the beauty of cycling. Maybe I misunderstand what it really is.

*heroes

Beautiful!

This is very excellent.

Beautifully written.

beautiful indeed. I loved the Tour for many years and rode in group rides. my favorite parts were the team time trial and the breakaway of the sprinters from the rest of the peloton. Armstrong's cheating itself wasn't so much the issue that took the romance away from it, but the pathetic way he conducted himself afterwards. Seeking redemption was so american and overbearing, and somehow he even managed to make cancer seem cloying, it tainted the ambiguity of the sport more than every other perennial doping scandal. It was too much to shrug off.

When I think about "cheating taken to an artistic level," Baseball is the sport that comes to mind first. Drugs, tampering with the ball, tampering with the bat, sign stealing, and so on.

Baseball is also rife with gamesmanship. stuff that feels like it could be cheating, but isn't - or, stuff that's cheating, but mostly unenforced. There's too much to be worth talking about here. Just read [1] instead.

It makes sense that Baseball would be this way. It's stochastic. The outcome of one pitch has no innate correlation with the outcome of the next. There's relatively little causality in Baseball, and when everyone is a pro, it's hard to rely on talent alone. Some might even say it's a fool's errand.

[1]: https://thebaseballcodes.com/2021/06/24/gamesmanship-in-base...

May I introduce you to Smokey Yunick:

> In another incident, Yunick showed up for a race with stock fender wells still installed on his Chevelle, even though the rules stated they could be removed. After the car qualified well due to improved aerodynamics, fellow competitors complained. Yunick replied, "The rules say you MAY remove them. They don't say you HAVE to." After qualifying, Yunick promptly cut out the fender wells. After further complaints to NASCAR, Smokey said, "The rules don't say WHEN I can remove them."

A racer after HN's heart.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokey_Yunick

Motor racing has the best opportunities for cheating by engineering and almost cheating by creatively interpreting the rules. My favorite two cheats are the NASCAR that shed weight in the form of ball bearings when lapping, and Toyota's air restrictor that opened up when installed that got them banned from rally racing.

The ball bearing thing is especially brilliant because they were released from the jacking points where NASCAR inspectors lifted the cars. The one point under the car they couldn't inspect.

I don't understand enough about cars to see what is special about this. Do the stock fender wells help and that's why it was better for him to keep them when nobody else did? And if so why did he remove them later to be like everyone else? What am I missing?

If the advantage is aerodynamic he should've kept them the whole time. If the point was to lose weight for the race, I don't get why doing it in qualification. Can someone explain?

Not sure of the specifics. The point is he did something different that appears to have been advantageous. His competitors read the rules differently or didn’t think to try.

If I had to guess taking the fender liners out could help cool the brakes. Qualifying is short so the heat buildup isn’t as important as in a full race.

NASCAR racers have also been known to blatantly cheat in one area to deliberately get caught and draw the attention away from additional cheats. The inspectors find one thing, flag it, then pass the car when it is fixed, leaving the bigger cheat undiscovered.

If you’re taking a car over the pits (rectifying a defect notice - not sure how universal this term is?) you leave a blown tail lamp or something so they have something easy to find. Then they don’t try too hard and find something expensive that needs rectifying. When you come back they only check the tail lamp noted earlier.

Was wondering the same thing, so I found https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2006/12/new-smokey-story.ht...

TL;DR: Fender wells give better aerodynamics but prevent easy tire changing.

Interesting. Your link mentions the wheel arches, not the fender wells mentioned in wikipedia. Definitely sounds like the same story otherwise. Your link is from 2006, the wiki article references a book. I wonder which is right.

Most iconic cheating I can think of is taking the subway during the NYC marathon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_Ruiz

This is one of the things I like about F1. Everybody plays the game and everybody knows everybody plays the game, even the fans (one with brains anyway). There's this sort of "Oooh clever one dear adversary, let me copy that/make a complaint" energy because everyone recognizes that the goal isn't to race within the rules, it's to find what the rules don't cover and race there.

You also, perhaps intentionally, described all of motorsports.

Do not forget all amazing discoveries made by cycling's so called cheaters. Where would the Furies, Joshuas and, dare I say it, Usyks be today if it weren't for Armstrong's pioneering work on blood doping in the 90's?

I would say that this one of the greatest casualties in the war on doping, Dr Ferrari especially has amassed a wealth of knowledge on blood and human energy systems that will never be acknowledged. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michele_Ferrari

While you can argue that amateur sports competitions promote healthy lifestyle and whatnot, professional sports is already a caricature of that. I don't see any reason not to organize "Olympics of doping" where rules allow participants to virtually do whatever they want in order to win.

There was era when doping was not banned, especially in cycling. But they had to do something with increasing number deaths.

Also amateurs try to emulate pros whenever possible.

There is a company trying to make this happen (no affiliation): https://enhanced.org/

When the effort itself loses meaning and cheaters take over, sport/activity receives 0 of my attention since it moves into pathetic amoral category, with little hope for improvement. It doesn't matter whether I do it or not.

One of benefits in my beloved climbing, alpinism, paragliding etc. - even top people there struggle to have good living and thus pros and amateurs alike are in for the actual sport, not chasing sponsors, getting an edge above the rest at all costs. Something about morality, fair game etc. Call me old fashioned if you want, I'll gladly wear that badge with honor (also a word very much applicable in these scenarios).

With alpinism it seems like the problem is that you can pay for achievement. See all the Everest "tourism"[1].

[1] https://theconversation.com/death-on-everest-the-boom-in-cli...

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