What is mechanical doping? The UCI officially calls it ‘technological fraud’ and introduced regulations last January that could see a rider given a minimum suspension of six months and huge fines if riders and teams are caught using a hidden motor in their bikes to boost their performance.
The early kinds of motors were rudimentary and hidden in the seat tube but more sophisticated examples based on Formula 1 and Eastern Block military technology apparently involve hidden magnets in wheels which are much more difficult to detect.
The UCI was left embarrassed at their own cyclo-cross World Championships when they discovered a rudimentary motor hidden in the bike of Belgium’s Femke Van den Driessche before the women’s race. She was eventually banned for six years.
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The existence of mechanical doping began as a whisper back in 2010 with suggestions of riders using hidden motors in professional races. Fabian Cancellara was at the centre the social media storm after he rode away from Tom Boonen on the steepest part of the Kapelmuur in the Tour of Flanders, leaving the Belgian commentators stunned at the force of his acceleration while seated. Cancellara always angrily denied the accusations. In 2014 and 2015 further suspicions of mechanical doping arose again, with video footage of spinning wheels fuelling the rumours via social media.
In 2016 the French television show Stade 2 and Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera carried out a detailed investigation and claimed that hidden motors had been used in several spring races.
The UCI played down the investigation but was forced to up its controls and also began to use x-rays at the Tour de France. However the suspicions continued to surface with Istvan Varjas, the Hungarian engineer believed to have invented the hidden motor technology, claiming that used mechanical doping had been used in the past and that the technology has developed and improved over the years.
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