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.

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-...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

At the Track and Field qualifiers for the 2024 Olympics they kept talking about how one of the runners was disqualified from Tokyo because she violated the whereabouts rules. They didn't say how.

Is that like parole where they check in, or is it like house arrest where you have an ankle monitor?

It's a bit of both. If you're an athlete being tested at that level, you have to keep your country's antidoping agency informed of your whereabouts at all times. They will randomly send testers to wherever you are and you have a short time window, like 1-3 hours to show up. If you no-show 3 times (I think) it counts as a positive test and you're banned. I really don't know how someone could run in the trials with too many missed tests and not be allowed to race the olympics... I'm pretty sure the rules are the same.

The athlete may have had a third failed test, but still had time to protest that. There have been examples where athletes filed changes to their schedule, but doping authorities missed those and ended up at the wrong place for a random test, for example.

(Having to file your whereabouts is horrendous, by the way. https://www.wada-ama.org/en/athletes-support-personnel/provi...:

“RTP athletes are required to provide the following whereabouts information on a quarterly basis:

- Home address, email address and phone number

- An address for overnight accommodations

- Regular activities, such as training, work, and school, the locations and the times of these activities

- Competition schedules and locations

- A 60-minute time slot for each day where they’ll be available and accessible for testing and liable for a potential ‘missed test’“

That “60-minute time slot” sounds somewhat reasonable, but (https://www.wada-ama.org/sites/default/files/2022-03/At_a_Gl...): “And remember, athlete can be tested anytime and anywhere – not just in their 60-minute time slot!”

Miss a plane? Plane delayed? You may have to inform your doping agency. A loved one suddenly ends up in hospital? Before you rush to go there, report where you’ll be.

The simplest would be dead battery on a solo run. I've killed mine on a workout before. I've also delayed a workout to charge and ended up regretting it.

More likely you're young, mad fit, and have some energy you want to burn off with a friend. You've heard about the Olympic Village.

No way do I want to tell some official whose apartment I'm visiting.

If you missed 2 before the trials and another after? I could see someone being on final notice before the trials and then fucking up again.

But they didn't actually say how and when she was DQed, just that she missed the Tokyo Olympics due to breaking the whereabouts clause. There are clearly favorites at the trials and if someone 'should' have gone I could see announcers making the speculative leap.

>> Riders are tested a lot and have to provide year-round whereabouts for random testing.

If I remember correctly, these rules were changed after the Armstrong scandal where he would be scheduled for testing, he would say he was at his house in Texas. The testing folks would show up and he just wouldn't answer the door and wait until they left so they couldn't test him. It was one of the ways he was able to dope on a set schedule, all the while being able to maintain he was being tested more than any other athlete - when in reality, he was just avoiding being tested.

It seems like a lot has changed since his scandal and several others that followed and they've really clamped down on what you're saying, changes in blood values and getting suspended if you cannot be reached for testing.

> and getting suspended if you cannot be reached for testing.

Hard to believe it took a scandal for that to be a rule.

Afaik that was already the rule 25-30 years ago when Armstrong was cycling. I can remember track and field athletes being banned when they didn‘t show up for surprise tests. So either cycling was more lenient or he got a bonus treatment because he was famous.

On a side note: much harder today to not be available/found than it was 30 odd years ago.

There is an app where you have to give your whereabouts for one hour every day. If you don't fill it in or are unavailable at the location for that hour, you get a strike. Three strikes in a set period and you will get a ban as if you had been doping.

One problem with the system is that it relies on countries being strict with their athletes, which they aren't incentivized to do. Also, it's easy to "be available" but not get tested by going somewhere remote for a height camp for a few weeks.

Like Russia where the testers were running the doping program.

Like Spain when there are legal problems with testing on weekends.

Guess why only Basso and Ulrich get disqualified after the operacion Puerto and why Spain dominate in almost every sports for more than a decade.

I didn’t understand this. You have to show up at a location once a day and stay there for an hour?

No, you have to give your location for an hour each day where you know you'll be. Like "on monday you can find me at the gym 12-13", or "Tuesday I'll be at the hotel room 18-19". And then you have to be at those locations.

Cyclist need to log virtually everything they consume (food, water, medications), on top of declaring their whereabouts and biological passports, in case they return a positive test. I'm not disagreeing with the "price of admission" for competing in the world tour shouldn't be high, but I can imagine it's stressful that something as simple as drinking water from a tap could, effectively, end your career.

Lizzy Banks goes into great detail about her experince with doping control and trying to overturn a positive result due to a contamination. It's a long read, but if you're a fan of the sport it's super interesting. https://lizzybanks.co.uk/

It was also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40612281