Motherfucker.
I honestly don’t like swearing in an Article, much less using such a word to open an article, but seriously. Motherfucker. A motor discovered in an U23 rider’s bike at the Cyclocross World Championships has to be the lowest of the low that anyone can go. I’m so pissed off, I’m rhyming. Which itself makes me madder than a hatter.
I have a pretty lenient stance on doping, which I hold to fairly wide criticism. I believe that the path towards doping is full of shadows and gradual steps towards the darkness. It is easy for me to imagine a young, ambitious rider who has sacrificed education and other vocations for the chance to become a Pro Cyclist, who is taken under the wing of an older, more experienced rider and to whom is explained the ways of the sport. If I was 18 and following that path, I cannot say with certainty what choice I would make, given the limited perspective one would have under those circumstances. While I hate doping and wish for clean sport, I hold limited judgement over those who have strayed down that path.
But we ride bicycles for the pleasure of propelling ourselves along the road under our own power. We push the pedals and we go faster, it is as simple as that; the motor resides in our heads and in our hearts. Performance enhancing drugs will, to various degrees, fine-tune and modify that motor, but there remains alive a notion that even a doped rider is holding true to this basic notion.
Competition is about finding out who is the superior athlete, it is as simple as that. We train, we fine-tune our equipment, we learn the strategy and tactics required to rise to the top. Doping certainly obscures that concept, but that a rider would abandon this fundamental principle of our sport by utilizing a motor in their bike seems to me an order of magnitude removed. It is gratuitous to the extent that there is no possible justification apart from an unabashed desire to win over all else.
This is bike racing, not motorcycle racing. For fucks sake.
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View Comments
@ChrisO
That argument can open a can of worms mate. If the UCI has approved the use of product X, it is legal to use in competition X. It only becomes "doping" if product X is unapproved or banned from competition. Di2, EPS, E-tap do make shifting much easier and reliable to an extent. However, they offer no power/wattage assist to the rider. One can argue that carbon wheels are a bigger advantage because they do save a rider watts, thus becoming a performance aide.
If I was an electrical engineering genius, I'd invent a little device to send an EM pulse that would reverse the direction of any hidden motors. A blast at a critical moment in a race would call out the cheaters in a hurry.
@MangoDave
This is genius! And they could not bitch about it, either!
Unfortunately, I had a tutor for my college Physics class and will not be working on this product anytime soon!
@KogaLover
Did you just post shit from Facebook here?
Good lord, I'm going to need to take a day off from work to keep up with this mess. What a big fucking storm we've got going on here.
@sengelov
But Ryder's pedals aren't turning, and he wasn't pedalling when he went down.
@RobSandy
I think he's got the electromagnetic wheels in there.
@ChrisO
The external power source, even for shifting, is a clean and practical boundary, I'll give you that.
I'll throw this out there: what if Ryder's freehub was sticky or jamming? Wouldn't that help turn the wheel and cranks a bit? Or would the chain just end up taking up the momentum?
@Ron
Agreed. When this story broke I checked the calendar but it wasn't April. As long as there is competition, there's going to be cheating. This kind of crap will keep happening unfortunately. Some of the motor "sports" take pride in it.
I'm working with my mechanic, Doctor and family spiritual adviser for a TUE on my new bike; my coach says if my TUE goes through I should do well this Spring
@wiscot
The momentum of sliding out while whizzing down a hill will spin a wheel like that, I've seen it myself and there weren't no goddam motors involved either. It looks completely normal at normal speed.