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A comment on Fuelling the Tour de France: Secrets of the team kitchens. Parent comment

Re:Fuelling the Tour de France: Secrets of the team kitchens by fuzzylightbulb on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @10:58AM (#40866585)
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-...

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Re:Fuelling the Tour de France: Secrets of the team kitchens by fsckboy on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @02:10PM (#40868555)
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.
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Re:Fuelling the Tour de France: Secrets of the team kitchens by hinkley on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @02:19PM (#40868633)
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).

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Re:Fuelling the Tour de France: Secrets of the team kitchens by jdietrich on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @04:40PM (#40869761)
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/

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Re:Fuelling the Tour de France: Secrets of the team kitchens by hinkley on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @04:47PM (#40869827)
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."
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Re:Fuelling the Tour de France: Secrets of the team kitchens by fbdab103 on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @07:19PM (#40870987)
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.
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Re:Fuelling the Tour de France: Secrets of the team kitchens by hinkley on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @08:39PM (#40871390)
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.
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Re:Fuelling the Tour de France: Secrets of the team kitchens by hinkley on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @02:18PM (#40868628)
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.

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Re:Fuelling the Tour de France: Secrets of the team kitchens by freejazz on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @03:30PM (#40869256)
> with the spinning wheels were especially damning

No it wasn't. Wheels spin through crashes all the time.

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Re:Fuelling the Tour de France: Secrets of the team kitchens by matsemann on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @04:08PM (#40869544)
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.
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Re:Fuelling the Tour de France: Secrets of the team kitchens by mvdtnz on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @06:23PM (#40870558)
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.
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