How Olympics Officials Try to Catch "Motor Doping"

Electric motors are definitely one way to achieve this but it seems so crude to use a device that’s detectable after the race.

Instead, how about sealing up the downtube and filling it with a weakly exothermic gas producing mixture* and then adding some turbine blades — sorry I mean “triple butted crank stiffeners”, your honour — to the bottom bracket instead? One doesn’t normally pedal at 10,000 RPM so some other sort of gas-energy harvester design would be better but you get the idea.

In a similar way to the case of the [spoiler alert] man stabbed with an icicle, the evidence will neatly and literally evaporate into thin air**.

*Something on the chemical spectrum between “science fair volcano” and “sugar and fertilizer oh whoops I’ve made a pipe bomb” ought to do it.

**Erm, apart from the gas turbine bit.

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.

Why not just have the Olympic host supply the same bike model to every participant rather than having each rider bring their own bike?

The original Olympics were competed in the nude. I'm not saying we need to go that far, but the Olympic committee has a standard pool for all the swimmers, and they could provide standard bikes for all the cyclists.

Video with example of electric motor build into bike frame[1] (Dutch /Flemish language). I love the ‘water bottle’.

[1] https://youtu.be/loP9IA6ozjA?feature=shared

What’s incredible to me is the continued cries of innocence from the cyclists that have been flagged by these detection mechanisms. Just like Armstrong after he was accused of doping.

It takes a special kind of person to continue to proclaim their innocence so fervently even when presented with irrefutable proof that they’ve cheated.

I remember the hullabaloo about the Femke Van den Driessche case; I'm shocked that the IEEE article's contention that the motor used there could produce 200W of power.

200W is a LOT in cycling. See

https://www.cyclinganalytics.com/blog/2018/06/how-does-your-...

We talk about one's Functional Threshold Power, which is the amount of power you could produce for a solid hour and then be completely spent. There are a variety of ways to arrive at this number (ie, other than trying to do exactly that, which is fraught with peril b/c of pacing issues), but the metric is well respected and is used as the foundation of most cycling training plans.

So the wattage is one thing, but your weight is the other. Watts per kilo is the magic number, because obviously it takes more power to move 6'3" Wout Van Aert than it does to move 5'9" Tadej Pogacar. Big men make more power, but it takes more power to move them, so usually the winners look more like Pogi (or, in the case of this year's Tour de France, they look EXACTLY like Pogi, ha ha).

Anyway: 200W is a BIG number. A LOT has been made of Pogacar's performance this year, and it may be his output was the highest ever seen in the sport. Estimates places his FTP in the 7w/kg range, which is bananas.

Pogi weighs 66kg, that implies power of about 462W. He may well be the most elite, powerful guy to ever race, and a 200W motor would add 40% for HIM. Van den Driessche is not in his league; it's likely 200W would come close to doubling her FTP.

If you're going to cheat, you need to be subtle. 200W isn't subtle. 200W output also implies one HECK of a battery, which would be obvious when lifting the bike. Given that the bike in question was for cyclocross -- where competitors carry their bikes often as they cross obstacles -- I'm thinking that must be a mistake.

The article ALSO note that while the maker of the motor in question is out of business, you can also experience a 200W push with a bike from Lotus. However, if you click through, you find that Lotus is claiming the motor in the bike they're selling "weighs just 300 grams but packs a powerful 125W per kilogram." IOW, the assist motor puts out only 37W.

Well, people dope now with CarbonMonoxide

https://escapecollective.com/exclusive-tour-riders-are-inhal...

Every cyclist has a powermeter and the power is recorded. Why not require them to upload the power file directly after the race? Since they all ride the same course, you can correlate power output with speed (taking riders height and weight into ac ount) to spot outliers. I know there's drafting, differently aerodynamic bike setups and other factors to consider, but in principle I guess a sudden 20 watt external power gain could be detected that way.

What's the trainer-athlete conversation like that leads up to installing such devices?

They've used thermal cameras in the past to catch this. Motors, especially motors this small putting out this many watts will get warm. Carbon fiber tubes generally don't get very warm. You just have to figure out how to point it at the riders when (or shortly after) you think they may have had the motor running.

Why call it motor doping? This has nothing to do with doping.

I have no plans on competing; for a purely civilian purpose, is there a way to get the "motor doping" stuff for bikes? It seems like it would be kind of cool to get a bit of an artificial push when biking.

For those who aren't following starting a few years ago the top cyclists have hit some crazy new levels unseen even in the EPO era and the top ones at this year's Tour De France were smashing power output records and not even looking tired in the winner's case.

I think so far no one has been caught motor doping even though they've looked for it for years. The rumor is the new magic is carbon monoxide rebreathing

Next logical step after doping: turning your sport into a motorsport.

Just give them all the same bike at the start.

> just 20 or 30 watts of extra power is enough to tilt the field and clinch a race

Any battery and motor which can deliver that for any appreciable amount of time should be plenty big and heavy enough to easily locate. 30 watts for a 2 hour race = 60 watt hours, over 200 grams of battery. Thats gonna be hard to hide on a bicycle made to be super lightweight.

Looks like the real cheaters are switching bikes between the inspection and the race.

Great to see Lance Armstrong's name (he of the legal threats regarding doping) getting rolled out and given a thorough going over again.

Why does cycling have such a reputation for this kind of thing?

Is it just that we see it more there? Or is there actually more cheating in that sport than others?

Is biking uniquely attractive to cheaters?

> Then, a magnetometer and custom software register disruptions to the field that may indicate the presence of metal or magnets in and around a bike’s carbon-fiber frame.

Hmm, they could try building an energy storage spring made of some composite materials.

The mockumentary Tour de Pharmacy is a fun watch about this and doping.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tour_de_Pharmacy

I would like to see such motors and how they are hidden. If it's not a mid drive motor or on the whee's hub, where can it be?

These motors are pretty cool. They'll make mountain biking a lot more accessible and for me, a lot more fun since a lot more time on the downhill sections :)

I wonder how the motor detection deals with groupsets with electronic shifting like Di2, which I assume are allowed in the competitions.

For those wondering what egregious motor doping (probably) looks like, here's an extremely famous (and some would say obvious) example of it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6z7uUe0tVA

For those not familiar with Tom Boonen, Cancellara effortlessly spinning up the Kapelmuur and putting in so much time that the chase helicopter can't even find him would be like beating Usain Bolt in the 100m by 5 seconds.

I wonder if an energy capture device would be allowed to balance out uphill and downhill effort.

Tangentially, it would be cool to just have sanctioned ebike races. We have motorcycles and cars, why not ebikes? I'd love to watch a high speed, no holds barred e-cyclocross/gravel/MTB race.

This whole topic of motor doping in cycling is so ridiculous.

For those not familiar with the subject: Only one racer was ever caught doing it.

I find it tremendously hard to believe that no one is cheating.

I know it's probably just for the headline but "Motor Doping" is the stupidest term I have heard since "kamikaze drone"

Formula 1 should revert to 1968 technology. No electronics, no radio, no airfoils, pump gas. Improvements only for safety equipment.

I hath spaketh.

The sport of cycling is toast. The culture is too far gone and honest folks can't escape the suspicion of doping.

Its my impression, or cyclists are more competitive to the point of cheating more than most sports?

couldn't they optimize this by only testing, say, the top 5 finishers?

Race cycling is such a degenerated sport.

Are bicyclists particularly bad when it comes to cheating?

A 20w electric motor is child's play, real women beat the shit out of a horse until it learns to dance.

Can't you just weigh the bike? how much weight does a motor+batteries add? And anything that isn't super light would get heavier scrutiny.

I desperately want an Olympic games where everyone is allowed to do whatever they want to win; where cheating is not only accepted, it's strongly encouraged.

Everyone comes roided up and doped out of their minds, and we see the limits the human body is truly capable of.