Posted on 02/02/2016 9:16:22 PM PST by Baynative
There is a minimum weight but it would be easy to swap after weighing as teams have extra bikes
The way to stop this is to stop using the dangerously light and throw away carbon fiber frames with over sized tubing and going back to traditional steel, titanium, or aluminum frames. Those don’t have room for the motors or batteries
I wonder if the motor is also regenerative; in that while rolling downhill it acts as a generator and recharges the battery.
This is a total cheat, but I’m fascinated on how they managed to cram a usable motor inside the frame.
Yeah, 200 watts is a lot of power for a burst (assuming the other rider don’t have 300 watts tucked away in their carbon down tubes), considering an average person (not a bike racer) is said to output 100 watts at full pedelling effort. The needed duration of the burst or bursts will determine the battery capacity required. Very low resistance cells will be used for maximum discharge rate.
A long time ago I was one of the top riders in our district... placed well in the Nationals... went to the Olympic Training Center... etc. etc. Then I had to go to work and I hadn’t been training at all for quite some time.
I went down to a park near my house that has a hilly circuit. Some local racers who had always been kind of jerks to me were riding through the park at the same time and asked me how I had been doing. I told them that I hadn’t been training and was just out for a casual ride.
When we came to the first long hill of course they all attacked and I wasn’t able to keep up. Fortunately, while I was struggling up the hill a car full of girls about my age started to pass me. They had their windows down. I grabbed the passenger door handle and asked them to please pull me up to my friends. The girl who was driving gave it some gas and I caught up to the other riders at the top of the long hill and they were pretty well spent.
I of course had rested all the way up the long hill. As soon as we hit the base of the next hill I attacked and left them all behind. They had no clue how I had been capable of doing this. A couple miles later I sat up and waited for them on my way down the last hill on the way out of the park. They were all asking me how I could still drop them if I had not been training. I told them that it must just be natural ability. It wasn’t an actual event, more of a joke, but that is the closest that I ever came to cheating.
Better technology. Better training. Better conditioning.
Today’s athletes have their performances analyzed by the foot to see how they might get a better time on a particular track. 70’s athletes were amateurs compared to what is available today.
I doubt they would want to deal with the drag involved in a regenerative setup and also the size and complication of the controller (they have to dissipate a lot of heat).
Hmmm... Mr Bean rides...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cioiZ54s2k
My bike wasn’t that bright in the first place, I’d hate to make it dopier.
It was also NASCAR’s Richard Petty that summed this up pretty accurately, “If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t racin’.”
“It wasn’t my bike — it was that of a friend and was identical to mine,” a tearful Van den Driessche told Sporza, AFP reported. “This friend went around the course Saturday before dropping off the bike in the truck. A mechanic, thinking it was my bike, cleaned it and prepared it for my race,” she added, insisting that she was “totally unaware” it was fitted with a hidden motor.”
Very convincing, like when Sammy Sosa’s corked bat broke during a game and his excuse was that it was a “practice bat”.
‘First incidence’? I recall a similar scheme a decade, or so, ago, though maybe a different race. The problem is that ounces (grams?) on the bicycle cost a lot in any race. The question becomes: “can you bring along more energy than you expend carrying it and the motor along the whole race? In a long race, I doubt it.
In the late 90s I was in Arizona for a race and was out for a warm up ride before the crit with three other riders. On a frontage road along side the freeway we saw a farm truck pulling a huge tractor on a trailer pulling out of a side road ahead of us. Our timing was perfect and we caught him just as he was getting up to speed, about 30mph.
We got in the draft and motor paced behind him for probably 1/2 hour or more, really enjoying spinning so effortlessly.
We heard him decelerating as he slowed to turn off and figured it was time to head back. That's when I glanced to the side an noticed something ominous. It was a plastic shopping bag blowing in the wind as fast as we were going AND in the same direction.
Our ride back to town in a 20mph head wind was miserable and I couldn't recover. The crit course had a long 4% grade on the backside and I got dropped on about halfway into the race. I was so spent I couldn't even suck wheels long enough just to finish. But I got to watch a bike mechanic from San Diego named Chris Horner, who later had a great pro career and high finishes in the TdF, lap the field and collect about $1,500 in primes riding all by himself.
Most pro bicycle races have minimum weights that the bikes have to meet. For the Tour De France it’s just over 15 lbs. (6.8 kilos). So in theory, one could build a 13 pound bike and add a two pound motor and still be riding a bike that is no heavier than the ones any of the other riders are on.
IIRC there was some conspiracy theory style speculation a few years back that Fabian Cancellara might have done this but there was no hard evidence found (at least that I am aware of).
Free Republic always has something new and interesting to learn. I have followed Pro Cycling for years and never heard of mechanical cheating.
Femke Van den Driessche should do want Lance did: pay the UCI guardians $100,000 every year.
Mechanical gears inside the frame? Sweet. I want one. Just kidding, kind of.
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