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.
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.