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.
I'm thinking one way to easily do motor doping is via the bike changes. A rider swaps a doped bike brought in by the team that wasn't checked at the start during the easy portions and rides 100km saving watts along the way. They then change back to a regular bike before things get intense and meanwhile the team finds a way to discreetly get rid of the doped bike.
After the stage the doping controls check the regular bike, but are unaware of the existence of the doped bike.
I used to give cancellara the benefit of the doubt. But after discovering the very very sneaky second bike change I think its very unlikely he didnt do mechanical doping.
Cancellara had a mechanical issue and did a first bike chance. The main mechanic jumps out of the car and gives him a new bike. A few km's later Breschel has a real issue and requests a new bike, but the main mechanic isnt in the car anymore resulting in Breschel getting the wrong bike, losing a lot of time and never returning to the front. A few km further the images show Cancellara suddenly sitting on his original bike.
What happened, at the point where cancellara did his first bike change, the stage makes a loop. The mechanic had to walk 500 meter to get on the other part of the stage. What does amateur footage reveal. In a turn everybody where makes the short turn, Cancellara goes wide where the main mechanic is waiting with the original bike and you see Cancellara do a lightning bike swap.
Its a sad thing but after all these years I am convinced Cancellara cheated.
You vastly overestimates that tiny battery and motor vs. the athlete's legs.
The only time it make sense is in sprints where it can contribute a significant torque increase for a short while. Over 100 km you might as well be better off without that weight.
There's a reason why all electric vehicles are heavy and burly looking electric bikes only have range of 20mi, and those batteries are not constrained by weight or shape to fit in a road bike tube.
AFAIK it used to be common sight in the 90's but they are not allowed to do that anymore. Reasons riders just swap bike at any doubt of issue, then they draft the "team cars caravan".
Wait now I'm imagining purely mechanical regenerative braking. Like the bike has no ability to generate its own power, but it has a spring (or compressed air or compressed liquid) inside the frame that contributes to turning the gearshaft but gets rewound/compressed while braking.
Is this possible? Would it be against the rules as written?
The UCI rules are... extensive; it's definitely disallowed [1]. Even if not, there's a rule along the lines of "any technical innovation must be pre-approved," and I am pretty confident it would not be.
[1] Probably by article 1.3.010: "The bicycle shall be propelled solely, through a chainset, by the legs (inferior muscular chain) moving in a circular movement, without electric or other assistance." - https://www.uci.org/regulations/3MyLDDrwJCJJ0BGGOFzOat
> Probably by article 1.3.010: "The bicycle shall be propelled solely, through a chainset, by the legs (inferior muscular chain) moving in a circular movement, without electric or other assistance."
Well that just says you need to build your regenerative braking system into the chainset. Use of stored energy is obviously allowed or else you couldn't make use of gravity when on a hill.
> Even if not, there's a rule along the lines of "any technical innovation must be pre-approved,"
What innovation? Mechanical energy storage is ancient technology.
>Use of stored energy is obviously allowed or else you couldn't make use of gravity when on a hill.
You've walked past gold in search of silver. A biking competition that disallowed the use of gravity would be wild. What would that even look like? How could it be run? Compressed air jets to maneuver bikes onto friction platforms? Entire courses built into the non-rotating sections of space stations? Racers suspended on bungee cords to counteract natural forces?
A device could be affixed to each bike that measures wheel speed, as well as pressure cells for the pedals. Any energy that can't be accounted for from the pedals would result in the brakes being automatically applied.
Advantages from wind would also be negated, but I believe that's in spirit of the rule. At first just a single wheel speed sensor could be used, but once the meta evolved to doing stoppies/wheelies on downhill sections both wheels would need to be fitted with one.
The UCI banned some handlebars that were regarded as too far forward, they've banned elbows being too high, they've banned handlebars pointing slightly inwards. They'll ban anything that's even slightly out the ordinary and with no reasons given.
Not the person you responded to, but there are a number of changes they have banned, arguably for being too effective. Aerodynamic covers are not usable, recumbents are not usable (especially not ones with a cover, which are significantly faster).
I mean, I kinda get it, it's a traditional upright bicycle race where they want the human factor to dominate. But somewhere in there's a ~65% performance improvement they are leaving on the table (that is the difference in the "1 hour distance record" between traditional and fully faired recumbents).
> The actual unwritten rule is not so much against inventions, as against having any fun.
The rules, written or not, are about trying to adjudicate a competition of people, if you want a no holds bared technology based competition nothing precludes creating a different one (or participating in one, there’s no dearth of alleycat races and other odd events like the singlespeed world championship).
>The rules, written or not, are about trying to adjudicate a competition of people
Wouldn't this be best done by having one group make a bunch of identical bikes that are randomly assigned? Anything more than this and it is allowing some technology innovations and customization, regardless of if the reason is deemed justifiable or not.
You could, but you'd still have a similar problem. Imagine that footraces all had to be run in the same model shoes, in whatever size.
Human body variation far exceeds any kind of standard sizing. There's a reason that anything that fits a body often has hundreds of different competing designs and materials and size specs and different people are more comfortable with different ones.
It's bordering intractable to try to make a "standard" bike that fits the full variation of human bodies. Making that a requirement for a race would favor people who happen to have bodies more congruent with whatever your geometry and materials and sizing quantum are.
What irks me a bit is that they are supposed to be about bikes, but in reality they are only about bikes that look exactly like the ones they have in mind.
Eg (if I remember right) they also specify a minimum wheel radius, because at some point people started doing well with those, and the people in charge didn't like that.
And they might as well be right: they have an entertainment business to run. They don't care about finding the best or anything like that.
I disagree that the sport is about bikes. I think the sport is about cyclists. The olympics is particular is built around human athletic competition not technical competition.
How do you find the best cyclist if the quality of the bikes is wildly different?
In any experiment, you have to control for the factors other than the ones you're looking to test. I don't think its fair to say that they don't care about finding the best, they're just trying to find the best of a different category than you're interested in.
As GP said. There is also space for different competitions about technology (in motorsport, formula 1 has both a driver championship and a constructor championship which is about the technology).
Ever go to a go kart track and notice that some karts are faster than others? They're all identical as far as the eye can see, but in reality tons of subtle differences pop up.
You can have spec bikes, but there no way they'll all be tuned identically, all have the exact same lubrication in all the bearings, all have the exact chain tension, all have the axles torqued identically. All the derailers built exactly the same... One bike will get inevitably have an advantage over the others.
Why? The whole point is to standardise, I thought? They are already _not_ accommodating preferences for eg recumbent bikes. So what measure are a few more preferences not accommodated?
In any case, you can make a bunch of different official sizes.
No, the main point (as already explained by someone above) is that this competition is about the cyclists, not equipment. The idea is quite simple, but leads to complex, sometimes somewhat arbitrary rules, but they in the end work quite well to regulate the competition.
No offense, but you're clearly someone who doesn't know much about cycling, but are insisting that the cyclists (competition organizers) are "doing it wrong". Arguing with that is tiring, so I won't continue here.
I genuinely see the point you're trying to make, but fitting a bicycle is like fitting an article of clothing. It's is laughable to suggest clothing be one-size-fits-all the same way it is for bicycle geometries. It doesn't compare.
> There is also space for different competitions about technology (in motorsport, formula 1 has both a driver championship and a constructor championship which is about the technology).
And even then the technology is severely curtailed, it has to compete within a fairly restrictive design envelope.
Of course you are. If you’re against any rule you personally dislike or misunderstand you’re not for rules.
> What irks me a bit is that they are supposed to be about bikes
See that’s your problem: you completely missed what the competition was about.
The competition is no more about bicycles than an archery competitions is about bows and arrows.
The competition is about the athletes, the gear is only the means through which it happens. That’s why the name on the podium is that of the cyclist, not of the bike manufacturer.
Viewers are turned off if one of the competitors is seen to be winning simply due to having a better bike. The main characters in the show are the riders, not the bike builders.
Which viewers are those? Pro cycling fans are interested in bike manufacturers and technology, as well as in the riders. Gaining advantages through having better bikes (within reason) is a key part of the sport and part of what makes it fun to watch.
Even if recumbent bikes were not forbidden, no one would use them. Cycling is a sport of dignity. See also, underhanded free throws in basketball, which are strictly superior to the usual free throw style, but lack dignity and are embarrassing to perform so no one does them.
Hide it under one of the screws? Though surely one could develop a nozzle apparatus that would fill the pipe with gas and then weld the hole shut.
Anyway, GP is onto something interesting here. I'd watch the hell out of a sport based on creative attempts to overcome the rules and hide it from the judges.
> I'd watch the hell out of a sport based on creative attempts to overcome the rules and hide it from the judges.
NASCAR. This sport is all about bending the rules, gray areas and just plain trying to cheat. Back in the old days they would fill the roll cages will ball bearings during inspections, then pull a plug and drain them out before the race. The jack men, used to strategically dent the side of the car to strategically steer the air to get better downforce.
Matthew Carter (ex-team principal of the latter-day Lotus F1 team) has an anecdote that the team had a wing component that held the wing in a legal configuration, but was designed to break under racing forces. When it (inevitably) broke, it allowed the wing to flex into an illegal (but more performant) configuration. Since F1 has a rule that allows exceptions to illegal car configurations if they are due to damage, they were able to pass inspections by saying that the illegal configuration was due to the (intentional) damage.
there was a recent thing where Joey Logano was penalized for driving with a webbed glove. He'd hold it over a gap in the window (open but with a safety net over it) to reduce drag. Lots of drivers use their hand to do that, but the gloves can't have extra webbing. It's kind of shocking how much that matters for drag.
Another Yunick improvisation was getting around the regulations specifying a maximum size for the fuel tank by using 11-foot (3 meter) coils of 2-inch (5-centimeter) diameter tubing for the fuel line to add about 5 US gallons (18.9 liters) to the car's fuel capacity.
There was a version of denting the side recently where they were pulling out a corner near the outside back wheel for an aero advantage. I think they banned that pretty quickly because it was tearing up tires way more often.
Back during the Wild West of Group B rally, some teams (I forget which), ran their cars with cardboard tubes in place of roll cages! Perhaps an apocryphal story but those times were nuts.
I wasn’t being negative! I genuinely would love to see the ingenuity involved with trying to get something over like this on people really looking for it.
Well with the gas turbine you’re still in the same boat as having an inspectable device on the bike after the race though I guess it won’t set off any magnetic field detectors.
why not bypass the bike completely? Thin flexible solar panel - disguised as some hologram-like corporate sponsor logo or even under the shirt with the shirt somewhat transparent or the panel weaved into the shirt - on the back of the cyclist as a source of energy which is fed as electric impulses straight into the cyclist muscles, pacemaker on steroids so to say. This can also be done in the other sports - like long distance runners for example. Another use of the energy, instead of into the muscles, is to generate some wave like vibrations of the shirt and the pants, like dolphin skin does, to decrease the air friction.
Like a pacemaker the external impulse is to help jerk the muscle as the tiredness sets in, not to directly provide energy. For direct energy consumption one can for example implant into legs small - just for several Newtons of force - electrically contracting kind of artificial tendon/muscle.
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.