Motor doping thread

[Tienus]

Femke had bike nr 3 (most likely a non motorized bike) in the pits during the Koppenberg. Her tactic was to not change bike during a race. I wonder if she allways keeps a clean bike in the pits to not raise any suspiscion.

I had a look at the video of the world championship on my big tv screen to inspect what happened in the pits. The world championship uses the same pit twice each lap, they pass on two different sides of the pits. It means the riders pass the pits about every five minutes. This makes it unlikely that the UCI checked Femke's bike during the race.

Looking at the video I am pretty sure her team has only one spare bike in the pits. I also see one spare wheel. I have made some good stills but they are too large to upload.
From 11:29 there is a good overview of the pits and spare bikes.
From 11:33 you see Femke's crew and her spare bike. They wear the same black coat and both a black wooly.
The bike they hold has the same wheels as bike nr 3 that Femke leaves with after she abandones.
From 16:05 the pits can be seen on the other side.
At 16:12 her crew can be seen in box 1. Only a small peace of her backwheel can be seen.
At 22:09 her crew can be seen in the top lefthand corner. Why would they be standing there if the bike had been sealed and taken away?

Femke can be seen walking over the finish line with bike nr 1. A minute and a half later she climbs over the fence and jumps on bike nr 3. I am pretty sure its the same bike her crew was holding in the pits. I had a look at Femke's spare wheels. I think the set in combinatation with the tires is unique in her collection.
http://demuur.nu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/unnamed-7.jpg

 

[Tienus]

Re: Re:

One of the things on it was that to keep the structural integrity of the downtube and also benefit most from the motor, additional carbon was required. This is where Maud Kaptheijns' interview where she points this out and that Peter van den Driessche does carbon repairs was known. This need for the additional carbon likely accounts for the suspect downtube of Femke's bike that drew such attention. But it's not the bike she was using at Koppenbergcross, when she has the most apparent motor-assisted acceleration. Maybe that bike was not durable enough with the motor, maybe it was just fine but the benefits were too little for the worse conditions the further into the season you go. When the bikes she's used were identified, the fat downtube bike with the non-standard frame has been given the name "bike 1", the Koppenbergcross bike "bike 2" and the Koppenbergcross spare bike / bike she went away on after DNFing at the Worlds, not believed to be motorized, "bike 3". A previously-used white bike was also identified, but not seen this season. Attention was also given to a slightly off paint job on bike 1, which is a non-standard Wilier frame (as Kaptheijns pointed out, Wilier only make one sort of frame for the type of bike, which is the frame that bikes 2 and 3 have. Makes me wonder if the frame of the old, no-longer-used bike had been modified and given a new lick of paint).

I wonder if Wilier may have changed the downtube size. Here are pictures of two Wilier carbon cyclocross bikes. The first one has a larger downtube (near the bottom bracket) than the second one, to my eyes anyway. Take a look - are my eyes fooling me?

http://cx.cxmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/laura-verdonschot-wilier-cyclocross-crossvegas-img_9769-ayee_1_1.jpg

http://content.competitivecyclist.com/images/items/1200/WLY/WLY0020/MATBK.jpg

The second is an older model with external wiring.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Re: Re:

I wonder if Wilier may have changed the downtube size. Here are pictures of two Wilier carbon cyclocross bikes. The first one has a larger downtube (near the bottom bracket) than the second one, to my eyes anyway. Take a look - are my eyes fooling me?

http://cx.cxmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/laura-verdonschot-wilier-cyclocross-crossvegas-img_9769-ayee_1_1.jpg

http://content.competitivecyclist.com/images/items/1200/WLY/WLY0020/MATBK.jpg

I don't really know because we only see one with the full bike and the other as frame only. The paint job may affect it too.

Either way, I'd suspect it's academic, because using the images that the user "ooo" showed a few days ago, it would appear that Femke's Koppenbergcross bike (bike 2), the one using the standard Wilier frame, looks to match up to the first image you show, the fatter downtube of the two. Bike 3 (the one we don't think has ever been motorized) uses the same frame.

The bike which caused all the fuss that Kaptheijns and Stultiens mention is this one (bike 1), you can see how the downtube is significantly wider than the frame on her other two bikes and significantly wider than the standard Wilier frame. This is the bike she rode in Hoogerheide where it was considered strange she didn't change bikes due to conditions, and it's also the bike she rode at the Worlds. For the UCI's story to be fully true, the family would have needed to have cottoned on to people's suspicions of the motor in bike 1 and removed it. If they only had one motor this would entail putting it in bike 2, with the intention to move onto the motorized bike partway through the race to try to soften suspicion. We don't know if bike 2 was always motorized with them having two engines or only sometimes, with one engine being moved from frame to frame periodically.

But from Tienus' post above this doesn't seem to be likely, if bike 3 (the presumed 'clean' bike) is the one in the pits (this also makes her abandonment strange, unless she was asked to hand over her bike at the end of the home straight, exchanged it for the spare, and then abandoned after that with the cameras only picking that up after she moved the bike over the fence. This also makes her riding away on bike 3 after it's supposedly been confiscated impossible. The only way this can be possible - that she had a bike confiscated during the race and the confiscated bike is not the one she rode, like the UCI say - is if they have some new gear for bike 2 that matches bike 3, and took the motorized bike 2 to the pits instead of the clean bike 3 by accident.

 

[Tienus]

Bike 2 could also be reinforced with extra carbon. It would only have to be a few milimeters extra. Hard to notice on pictures of a black frame but probably detectable with the naked eye. Maybe she liked bike nr 1 because the tube can hold a larger battery.

 

[sniper]

Re: Mechanical doping: first rider caught

Did Henao have a disc wheel at his TdS recon crash? Have always been curious why sky left the frame but took the wheels.

interesting.
you have a link to this?

 

[Hawkwood]

Re: Re:

[/quote]

I didn't write what's in your second quote above purporting to be from me. If you're going to quote me please ensure you're actually quoting me![/quote]

Sorry! Not sure how that happened. It was Farcanal who wrote that. Fixed now, both here and in my original post.[/quote]

Thank you.

 

[Buffalo]

Re: Mechanical doping: first rider caught

Did Henao have a disc wheel at his TdS recon crash? Have always been curious why sky left the frame but took the wheels.

interesting.
you have a link to this?

http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/sergio-henao-crashes-during-tour-de-suisse-recon/ Tinkoff tweeted the pic after finding the frame abandoned on the side of the road, sans wheels.

 

[jyl]

Re: Mechanical doping: first rider caught

Did Henao have a disc wheel at his TdS recon crash? Have always been curious why sky left the frame but took the wheels.

interesting.
you have a link to this?

http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/sergio-henao-crashes-during-tour-de-suisse-recon/ Tinkoff tweeted the pic after finding the frame abandoned on the side of the road, sans wheels.

The frame is destroyed. Maybe the wheels were salvageable.

 

[heart_attack_man]

Re: Mechanical doping: first rider caught

Did Henao have a disc wheel at his TdS recon crash? Have always been curious why sky left the frame but took the wheels.

interesting.
you have a link to this?

http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/sergio-henao-crashes-during-tour-de-suisse-recon/ Tinkoff tweeted the pic after finding the frame abandoned on the side of the road, sans wheels.

The frame is destroyed. Maybe the wheels were salvageable.

I'll have the groupie...

 

[sniper]

Re: Mechanical doping: first rider caught

Did Henao have a disc wheel at his TdS recon crash? Have always been curious why sky left the frame but took the wheels.

interesting.
you have a link to this?

http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/sergio-henao-crashes-during-tour-de-suisse-recon/ Tinkoff tweeted the pic after finding the frame abandoned on the side of the road, sans wheels.

cheers!
makes sense if the wheels were doped
(not discarding more harmless explanations of course)

i also like how it contradicts Movistar's *** story about the "hide it!" incident last year that caused rumors of motorization. In case you haven't seen it: http://www.stickybottle.com/latest-news/video-this-movistar-hide-the-bike-clip-leads-to-motorised-bike-allegations/

This is what Movistar said afterwards to put down the rumors:

“It’s normal when a bike is broken to put the bike inside the car because if the photographers take shots it can be a problem for the sponsors.”
...
Amezaga knows about the rumours, but said the just wanted the broken Canyon frame out of the public’s eye.

“For us, it’s normal to change the bike and to put the bike in the car and take it to the hotel because the frame is broken and for the sponsor, it’s important that the bike is not seen.”
http://www.cyclingweekly.co.uk/racing/vuelta-a-espana/motorised-bike-movistar-respond-to-social-media-conspiracy-theories-190362#qxv2GkZJBPwPIFfl.99

and some dude in the comment section:

Thanks, yes, carbon frames look pretty pathetic and scary after crashes, there's no way the bike sponsor wants that seen and especially photographed.

 

[Martin]

Re: Mechanical doping: first rider caught

Just a note: It's funny that this topic is in the section called "The Clinic".
A proper name would be "The Garage"

 

[arthurvandelay]

Re: Mechanical doping: first rider caught

Just a note: It's funny that this topic is in the section called "The Clinic".
A proper name would be "The Garage"

Good stuff Martin. On a serious note it makes the skeptic in me wonder how and where
such mechanical doping might be done. Would a team outsource it to a third party? How do you keep it secret? Do you put special stickers on a "doped" wheel, maybe relegate it to the care of the chief mechanic only ?

Or do you go "all in" and make it team policy so that everyone is clear about how to treat these bikes and/or wheels. Otherwise you would risk detection in a serious crash as alluded to above. A well-meaning bystander might help with a wheel change and see something they shouldn't. The logistics of mechanical doping appear to have great risk of detection or tattling by a disgruntled employee. If a rider is drugs doping it could be kept relatively discreetly between that rider and his or her physician.

Imagine the media outfall if a team car got sideswiped in the TDF (as does happen on occasion) and a "doped bike" was seen dangling off the roof rack with wires and magnets hanging out of a smashed frame!!

 

[sniper]

Re: Mechanical doping: first rider caught

A well-meaning bystander might help with a wheel change and see something they shouldn't.

This has already happened, sort of. See the Movistar clip above.
And boy oh boy, the enormous consequences!

Froome's Ventoux ascent, lot's of stuff there that can only be explained with a motor.
Again, the consequences are none.

Cancellara. More than enough indications to open an investigation, but of course that never happened.

So what risk of detection?

Hesjedal? lol. UCI went to check his bike the day after. Go figure. He may not have had a motor, but it shows the UCI doesn't want to know in the first place.
If you have a governing body that doesn't want to expose motorcheats, there's no real risk of detection.

 

[sniper]

arthurvalderlay: The logistics of mechanical doping appear to have great risk of detection or tattling by a disgruntled employee.

That risk is very small.
What would any mechanic have to gain by going public?
The risk exists, I guess, but is negligible.
You underestimate how many people get turned on by being in on the secret, and even getting paid for it.

That said, the informant for the Gazetta article already went 'public', sort of. He said he's sold 1200 motorized bikes over the past few years.
But then again, who takes that guy and his story seriously?
Is the UCI on the case trying to talk to that guy?
And did UCI ever try to talk to Varjas?
Or Lemond even?


Just saying, at present, motordoping strikes me as a relatively low risk-high reward undertaking, especially for high budget teams, but also for amateurs, as there are no/hardly any cameras there and no testing.

 

[carton]

Re: Mechanical doping: first rider caught

Did Henao have a disc wheel at his TdS recon crash? Have always been curious why sky left the frame but took the wheels.

interesting.
you have a link to this?

http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/sergio-henao-crashes-during-tour-de-suisse-recon/ Tinkoff tweeted the pic after finding the frame abandoned on the side of the road, sans wheels.

The frame is destroyed. Maybe the wheels were salvageable.

Yep. This.

Also, undamaged wheels are very quickly taken off and stored on bike racks. Disc wheels (are we sure he was riding discs on a scouting run?) are even more expensive and therefore rarely plentiful even when the sponsor provides them (not always, even for the big teams).

Shattered carbon frames have basically no value (and grouppos are consumables to WT teams), are unsafe on most racks, and are mainly just really hard to shove onto the backseat of a team car that has a gravely injured rider lying on it.

I mean, maybe one of Sky's GT workers was riding super-expensive never-seen-before electromagnetic disc wheels on a recon ride. This is cycling,after all. But it's hard not to go with Occam's razor on this one.

 

[blackcat]

Re: Mechanical doping: first rider caught

Just a note: It's funny that this topic is in the section called "The Clinic".
A proper name would be "The Garage"

Good stuff Martin. On a serious note it makes the skeptic in me wonder how and where
such mechanical doping might be done. Would a team outsource it to a third party? How do you keep it secret? Do you put special stickers on a "doped" wheel, maybe relegate it to the care of the chief mechanic only ?

Or do you go "all in" and make it team policy so that everyone is clear about how to treat these bikes and/or wheels. Otherwise you would risk detection in a serious crash as alluded to above. A well-meaning bystander might help with a wheel change and see something they shouldn't. The logistics of mechanical doping appear to have great risk of detection or tattling by a disgruntled employee. If a rider is drugs doping it could be kept relatively discreetly between that rider and his or her physician.

Imagine the media outfall if a team car got sideswiped in the TDF (as does happen on occasion) and a "doped bike" was seen dangling off the roof rack with wires and magnets hanging out of a smashed frame!!

we are gonna have to disagree on this.

see with tennis and the doping in tennis, who thinks the general public have one inkling. No one does, even with the fantastic blog, "tennis has a steroid problem".

Cos the fact is, people stick their head in the sand and dont give two hoots. No one cares. As long as there is a plausible deniability, the gatekeepers in the paid media will put a stronghold over this information getting out. Just like Snowden was comprehensively and successfully smeared by the fascist media.

Snowden, Mark Felt, Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Assange, these are not the exceptions to the rule, they are the exceptions that prove the rule.

 

[Tienus]

Short documentary of Koen Monu, organiser of the world championship cross in Zolder.
http://sporza.be/cm/sporza/videozone/sporten/2.25755/VeldrijdenWK/1.2567063
From 04:30 he is having a friendly chat with the Belgium UCI official who announced the news about Femke and who was sitting next to Cooksen during the press anouncement.

From 05:55 he chats with someone about the Femke incident the day before. I'm not from Belgium so anyone who understands Vlaams better than me please correct me:
-Pictures are being send to UCI.
-Belgium federation has been too slow.
-Yesterday it was big news but for us it was not.
-the question is if she was riding on that bicycle.

 

[Hawkwood]

Re:

arthurvalderlay: The logistics of mechanical doping appear to have great risk of detection or tattling by a disgruntled employee.

That risk is very small.
What would any mechanic have to gain by going public?
The risk exists, I guess, but is negligible.
You underestimate how many people get turned on by being in on the secret, and even getting paid for it.

That said, the informant for the Gazetta article already went 'public', sort of. He said he's sold 1200 motorized bikes over the past few years.
But then again, who takes that guy and his story seriously?
Is the UCI on the case trying to talk to that guy?
And did UCI ever try to talk to Varjas?
Or Lemond even?


Just saying, at present, motordoping strikes me as a relatively low risk-high reward undertaking, especially for high budget teams, but also for amateurs, as there are no/hardly any cameras there and no testing.

I've had a look at the Gazetta article, it makes interesting reading. I will admit to using a translation engine, but it seems to read fine, apologies if I have managed to mangle any of the article. It appears that the `industry guru' is talking about two or even three types of motor, it's not clear just how many. In the first a motor moves the rear hub via a plastic cog. Then there is the `electromagnetic' system that drives the wheel by the emission of energy (the picture of the wheel in the article is supposed to be this type). Then is appears that the `guru' might be talking of a motor mounted in the frame (the seat-tube version?). The `guru' goes on to say that the frame is opened up with a tool like a wood chisel, and then the motor inserted and the frame repaired, however this can lead to a weakness and the frame can fail! The `guru' says a similar system is used for opening up the rear wheel and installing the systems. I'm not an engineer but I would have thought for a hub based system you'd have to build it from the ground up, the plastic cog has to engage gears in the hub, plus there has to be the motor and energy source, these are major alterations. He/she mentions using high profile rims, this might make sense for the `electromagnetic' `energy emission' system, but not for the hub motor one. So you could try taking your Campagnolo Bora wheel to the guru's workshop and then watch as he or she sets about it with a chisel....

 

[ice&fire]

Re: Mechanical doping: first rider caught

Just a note: It's funny that this topic is in the section called "The Clinic".
A proper name would be "The Garage"

We already have The Workshop

 

[MacRoadie]

Re: Re:

The MIT motor is what is called a "pancake" motor because it's shaped like a disc. They've been around forever and I'm guessing what the MIT team was doing is finding ways to get sufficient torque out of it. Much, much more likely is that a hub motor is being used. My guess would be potted windings on the axle and the hub shell, run at very high voltage from a battery powered controller tucked into the frame. The only trick would be making sure you get a decent electrical connection from the dropout to the hub. It wouldn't be geared, so the setup would be low speed/high torque rather than something like the Vivax which can run at high rpm. That kind of motor is much easier to make. And I have no clue if you could build this hub motor to actually look like a "normal" hub.

John Swanson

I think the way to approach this would be to embed electrical contacts in each dropout, with the locknuts and axle completing the circuit, put the coil (windings) on the axle, with ferrous inserts or magnets in the hub shell. You'd need to electrically insulate the rest of the drivetrain. Problem is, the hub on a pro road bike is skinny, and the axle has to be hollow and mechanically strong enough for a rider bombing down a mountain at 60 mph. That leaves very little room for a motor to produce enough power to make the whole thing worthwhile. If we start seeing pro bikes with bizarrely large diameter rear hubs, then someone should go put a magnetometer next to the hub shell - or toss a paperclip at it.

Here's a typical pro bike rear hub (a Zipp):

What if you were to hollow the guts out of one of these bad boys?

 

[jyl]

That's certainly a lot roomier! However, I don't think any pro team uses Powertap powermeter hubs.

And all racers want powermeters, but a bike would look very odd with a (fake) hub powermeter and a (real) crank or pedal powermeter. Would attract suspicion, I think.

 

[ScienceIsCool]

Still getting caught up on the "how" rather than the "what". Motors are out there and we now have proof they are in use. Be assured that there is the equivalent of a Ferrari that is at the front of the game and is charging large dollars for the latest and best of innovation. We've only give a few "man"-hours in figuring out how to make a hidden motor. Others have given it a decade or more. I have to be honest that the engineering involved isn't that intimidating.

John Swanson

 

[jyl]

Re:

Still getting caught up on the "how" rather than the "what". Motors are out there and we now have proof they are in use. Be assured that there is the equivalent of a Ferrari that is at the front of the game and is charging large dollars for the latest and best of innovation. We've only give a few "man"-hours in figuring out how to make a hidden motor. Others have given it a decade or more. I have to be honest that the engineering involved isn't that intimidating.

John Swanson

Well, crank drive motors are clearly practical and powerful. 50 to 100 watts to the crank, runtime limited only by how much battery you stuff in the downtube.

Hub drive motors? In something that looks like a standard road hub (not a disc wheel), they can be only a small fraction as powerful as a crank drive can be, since the available room for such a hub motor is only a small fraction of the room available in the seattube. In something that looks like a disc wheel, hoo boy, you could really do something.

Rim drive is the big debate, I think. Of course a rim drive of useful power output can be built, but can it be visually indistinguishable from a standard World Tour bike? I believe the answer is no, and I'd have to see some real calculations to be convinced otherwise.

I guess we should define what "useful power" is. 5 or 10 watts is not useful, too little reward for the risk. 20 or 30 watts would be useful, if it is silent and can be sustained for a long time; 30 watts for only a short time is only going to be useful in a few specific race situations (MTF, sprint, key climb, etc).

But all of these designs can be easily detected, using magnetometer and thermal imaging tools. That is, I think, the "good" thing about motor doping. It is much harder to hide than, say, microdosing a drug during a block of training on a remote mountain.

 

[MacRoadie]

Re:

That's certainly a lot roomier! However, I don't think any pro team uses Powertap powermeter hubs.

And all racers want powermeters, but a bike would look very odd with a (fake) hub powermeter and a (real) crank or pedal powermeter. Would attract suspicion, I think.

Oh, I agree. No one today is going to show up with a PowerTap in 2016. I was just pointing out that there is precedence for large diameter rear hubs and it wouldn't be stretch in the never ending gimmick wars for someone to come along with some pseudo-scientific argument that increasing the diameter of the hub body only increases the weight slightly while creating a stiffer wheel.

Using that imaginary scenario, you wouldn't even have to pretend it has any power meter function to begin with, just an ostensibly stiffer wheel. "Hey we made the hub body wider so we could make the flanges lower, thereby reducing flange deflection" or some such rot.

 

[sniper]

Re:

Still getting caught up on the "how" rather than the "what". Motors are out there and we now have proof they are in use. Be assured that there is the equivalent of a Ferrari that is at the front of the game and is charging large dollars for the latest and best of innovation. We've only give a few "man"-hours in figuring out how to make a hidden motor. Others have given it a decade or more. I have to be honest that the engineering involved isn't that intimidating.

John Swanson

hammer head nail.

from the "guru" quoted in the Gazzetta i found this interesting:

"It’s such a perfect system that I’m sure some riders don’t know they’re using it. They just think they’ve had a great day,” Gazzetta dello Sport’s source claimed. "