Tiny motor powers a new threat to cycling races
‘Motordoping’ recorded at sport’s top levels
A gruelling cycling race is somewhat less gruelling if your bike is a motorcycle. Understanding this, some cunning cyclists may be turning the sport into NASCAR on two wheels by surreptitiously giving their bikes a motorized boost.
The first confirmed case of mechanical doping surfaced this year when a tiny motor and battery were found inside a Belgian cyclist’s bike, but that involved cyclocross, a comparatively minor branch of the sport. The latest accusations emerged Sunday on Stade 2, a sports program on the French television network that is also the host broadcaster of the Tour de France. The report suggested that motordoping is also at the highest levels of the sport.
Suggestions that top riders are rigging their bikes have escalated in the past several years. As was the case in the early 1990s with more conventional doping, riders who are the targets of such accusations have dismissed them.
But several current and retired professional riders, including the American Greg LeMond, are among those who have said it is a real problem. Brian Cookson, president of the International Cycling Union, has made the search for technologybased cheating a priority.
Suspicions stem f rom two factors: The technology exists, and there is an ever- growing library of videos that show suspicious performances and actions by riders as well as teams.
Anyone can buy systems that hide small motors and batteries inside bikes. Marketed as a way to help older or infirm people keep cycling, most of the systems power the axle that joins the two crank arms of the bike and are outwardly invisible, with on- off switches hidden under handlebar tape. Newer, even smaller, motor systems can slip into the rear hub to boost the bike from there.
For its report, Stade 2 positioned a thermal imaging camera along the route of the Strade Bianche, an Italian professional men’s race in March held mostly on unpaved roads and featuring many steep climbs. The rear hub of one bicycle glowed with almost the same vivid orange- yellow thermal imprint of the riders’ legs. Engineers and anti- doping experts interviewed by the TV program said the pattern could be explained only by heat generated by a motor.
The rider was not named by the program and could not be identified from the thermal image.
The program also used the camera at a gran fondo, an amateur and semi- professional event, in Italy. At least one bike showed a suspicious heat pattern around its cranks.
Corriere della Sera, an Italian newspaper that collaborated with the French program, reported that the thermal camera found signs of motors in seven bikes used in the Strade Bianche and at the Coppi and Bartali, another Italian race.