251–260 of 307 posts
I've been following this one on the cycling blogs, and I have a fairly cynical take on it: * They didn't actually name anyone. * They didn't catch anyone with a motor, red handed. * They did, however, manage to produce another 'cycling is dirty' narrative. Pretty useless, IMO.
Well except there's a video of someone's bike skidding around on its own on the site. So the motors do exist in the sport...
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I also ride motorcycles, but the bicycle I can ride int the lobby and take up the lift to the office - it's quicker door-to-door (over 8km) than the motorcycle, which I sometimes get to park close by but if I don't come in early I end up parking a few blocks away (or _gasp_ paying for parking). I;m with you on the dangers of people who don't have good situational awareness zooming around on electric bikes - but I thi…
> And crucially, I can ride the cheater bike home from the pub after a few beers... Not in the UK, you can't. Drunk in charge of a vehicle, no matter that the vehicle is just a bicycle.
If you are caught drunk (over the legal limit) on a bicycle, they will remove your _car_ driving license ( if you have one) and you either the let the bike there and call a cab or you have to walk with the bike home. Of course, next day you need to pay them a visit to pick the driving license :).
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If technology is integral, then why ban motors at all? Small motors and powerful compact energy supplies are technological advancements.
Why ban steroids? Why ban amphetamines? Whyban surgical modification? Why ban genetic engineering? Why ban motorised exo skeletons and nano technology? (I just read a great short story along these lines called ""Slipping" by Lauren Brookes - from the EFF'S PWNING TOMORROW short fiction anthology...)
It may be that many professional and elite amateur sports will not survive genetic modification, for example, because anyone can access elite athletic potential if they wanted to. Or, more disturbingly, only if their parents had chosen a genetic combination for one outcome over another. What would be the point of "being a fan" of an athlete with characteristics chosen from a menu?
It's nice that after all these years racing sports still come up with innovations that can help "regular" people. Now let's split the bike racing into assisted and unassisted ones to let the technology develop, and the "pure" racing continue.
Let's be clear. This is 100% cheating in races and can not be condoned. Otoh, I don't get the outrage by someone like Eddy Merckx, calling for a lifelong ban on Femke Van Den Driessche , the young female cyclist that was found to have a bike with an seatpost motor in her materials stand. You have to realize Merckx himself was caught several times on doping, receiving only mild punishments, and also one of those ex-ra…
Just take the bike out of the race entirely. Declare a year in advance that the bike will be XYZ model Q so people can train on them, and the race maintains custody of all race bikes, spares, etc. It's already a money-competition to see who can buy the best super-bike. Yes, you have to have a minimum weight, but that just means that you can take a superbike and spend the extra weight applying aerodynamic fairings whe…
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It's quite common to switch bike with one from a support car during a stage (Due to mechanical faults or otherwise). This could make it tougher.
I don't speak french, but in the video in the article they show several cyclists changing bikes for no apparent reason. I'm guessing that the film makers theory is that they're switching bikes to pass inspection after finishing the race, that's at least the suspicion I get when watching it. I think switching bikes during the race should be banned. Fixing a flat tire, a malfunctioning chain or similar can be allowed,…
I do agree with "if the bike breaks, you're done". Most racing is done this way, with a limited amount of things you're allowed to fix before you have to call it a day. I don't watch Formula racing but I used to watch NASCAR and they're allowed a backup car if they trash theirs during practice or qualifying, but not on race day.
the thing with mechanical doping is that if you aren't caught red-handed, you are free, with doping some races/competitions will freeze your samples and they can be tested years later to find out if you were using something that wasn't testable yet, but with mechanical doping, once you're done the race you're safe. And over a course of a grand tour stage, even if the boost is only 25W, it can easily make the differen…
Seems trivial to detect now though. It's no problem to just tear down the bikes of the first X finishers to look for mechanical aids. Detecting doping reliably is much trickier. edit: I think most high level bikes use carbon fibre frames? You could probably just use x-ray or ultrasound imaging to look for anything suspicious in the frame.
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I must be out of touch for sure. For me 'performance enhancing drugs' are not to be accepted as just 'an aspect of pro-sport'. Ruining (young) people's health, on top of making it near impossible for honest athletes to compete, makes drugs far more egregious than material cheats.
Absolutely, I don't understand how GP can causally accept how drugs damage thousands of people's health while harshly criticizing a different form of cheating which happens to use a different substrate than human flesh.
Barry Bonds used steroids to hit some home runs, and he got an asterisk on his record. The 1919 Black Sox Scandal participants threw some games to make money and received lifelong suspensions from baseball and changed the history and rules of baseball forever because it made a mockery of the sport. Same thing with Pete Rose, he made a mockery of the sport. Bonds is currently a hitting coach for the Marlins, while Rose is doing commercials since he was banned for life in 1989.
Steroid and other PEDs are terrible and have awful impacts on the users health and are a bad example for kids, but their effects are still in line with the sports. What you get is a bit of a stronger cyclist, but still a cyclist. With a motor, you're making a mockery of the sport. It's not cycling anymore, it's now a motorsport. You're not participating in the sport anymore.
There are plenty of discussions that revolve around how bad PEDs are. This isn't one of them. This discussion is about how cheating using PEDs is different from cheating by removing yourself from the nature of the sport altogether.
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Why though? In many areas of life, people for example work themselves to death voluntarily. Why is there not a sport where there are really no limits at all?
Because at some point it stops being fun to watch if your race from point A to B is won by a supersonic fighter jet. Also there's the pesky little problem of poor or up and coming athletes literally killing themselves to try to win big money, all for the benefit of some FIFA-alike and its sponsors.
Not when the opponent pulls out a surface to air missile.