TWO BIG STORIES - one good one bad

 

The good story.

BRITAIN’S Simon Yates’s stunning breakaway to snatch the lead and overall victory in the 2025 Giro d’Italia made headlines in the newspapers.

Yates had played his cards right for three weeks racing up through Italy from the Albania start, lying low but smartly remaining close to all the main contenders before blasting into decisive action at the last.

Who will forget his fantastic escape on the monstrously long Finestre mountain on the penultimate day – the very climb he had capitulated on in 2018 when Chris Froome destroyed the field in a much longer lone break to win the Giro?

From lying third overall at 1-21 to race leader Del Toro – who was trailed by  second placed Carapaz - Yates catapulted ahead of both to leave them several minutes adrift with a series of brilliant attacks to set off on a stunning 38km escape.

What a ride! What a tactical triumph for Yates’s Visma-Lease-a-bike team who prudently had sent their ace in the pack, Wout van Aert ahead in an earlier move – to assist Yates if he got clear!

And what a failure for the teams of Toro and Carapaz not to react to the fact that one of the world’s best classics riders, Van Aert, had been sent ahead for this purpose.

For when Yates joined the waiting Van Aert, himself a Giro stage winner earlier in the race, the Belgian took off at a searing pace towing Yates well clear.  The Giro was both won…and lost.

Love it, when bike racing produces such dynamic racing: love it, love it, love it!

That was the good story.

Here is the bad.

How ironic and unfortunate that the
The Observer, which ran a graphic report of the Yates’s epic, also chose that same edition to run a double page feature entitled: “The doping that could kill cycling.”

Hate it, hate it, hate it.

Because that certainly wiped the smile off my face.

Both were penned by Jeremy Whittle and I bet he cursed under his breath when he saw that the motor doping story should be run in the same issue celebrating Yates’s epic!

The feature was all about “mechanical doping”, and the “persistent rumours” that hidden motors have been used to win some of the biggest races.

And yet, it is 10 years since a rider was detected using an e-bike, Belgium’s Femke van den Driessche at the 2016 women’s world cyclo-cross championships.

Oh, well.

That’s cycle sport’s legacy! No getting away from it.

But hey, what a relief that the last big sports doping story to break last September was wholly owned by athletics. This concerned the women’s 1500 metres at the London 2012 Olympic Games, when samples taken from the athletes were stored for future analysis by improved detection methods.

The event was described as the dirtiest in history, by the BBC, “with six of the first nine finishers falling foul of anti-doping regulations, the latest being Russia’s silver-medallist Tatyana Tomashova.”

She was banned for 10 years.

I suppose it is too much to expect that doping has been completely eradicated in cycling! Are we due one?

So what exactly did this latest “motor doping” story say?

Here is some of the detail.

The article was dominated by an illustration of a racing bike, showing how a motor could be concealed, with details of electro-magnetic devices in the rims spinning the wheels faster.

Small motors can be hidden in the bottom of the downtube, activated by a hidden trigger on the handlebars!

But the view from within the sport is that using a motor to win would be the greatest betrayal, worse than the conventional doping with medicines and pills - because with an e-bike the machine is doing the work, not the rider!

There is cheating and cheating!

So are e-bikes being used?

It has been claimed that in the 2015 Tour de France a dozen riders were using hidden motors!

The article refers to the extraordinary performances of Tadej Pogocar, Froome, Alberto Contador and Fabian Cancellera which have fuelled conspiracy theorists.

All have denied wrongdoing.

So now there are post-race checks….with no advance warning of the UCI tech fraud squad approaching with scanners to examine machinery.

But it’s not easy for them.

Riders can and do change bikes during a race, usually for a mechanical!

Maybe they only use the e-bike for a particularly difficult stretch of the course before changing to a clean bike!

Which means they may finish on a different bike, so the one they started out remains undetected.

It all seems far-fetched to me! But then again I was one of those taken in by smooth-talking EPO fuelled Armstrong 20 years ago, right until the last!

But if the UCI squad cannot discover e-bikes it means one of two things. They’re aren’t any! Or if they are in use, then the team(s) doing it, are quick to spirit the bike away at the finish.

But how on earth can they hide it during a race. Do they conceal it somewhere in one of several team vehicles - cars, buses or trucks? It sounds farcical.

Unless someone is turning a blind eye – as they used to do in the bad old days.

Who hasn’t read Willy Voet’s book “Breaking the Chain - Drugs and Cycling – The True Story”, published in 2001? This is shocking account of organised doping in cycling. It provides an ugly perspective of the sport back then.

It may puncture any romantic notions you have of suffering for the cause. It has always been about suffering.  Ripping your tripe out was an expression I used to hear.  Our club training captain would study the route of that Sunday’s  hilly road race, grit his teeth in mock horror  at the severity of what was in store and call out, “Agh, der pain!” in expectation of the suffering to come.

But we loved it!

But we knew it was our choice, to conquer the pain and try for a placing, that was all we asked of ourselves. Of course, we also knew we didn’t have to do it.

Professionals have no choice.

Use of drugs has been common in sport from the earliest races in the 1800s.

One such pain killer reported to be in common use before it was added to the banned list a few years ago, is Tramadol. I recall a Sky team member referring to its frequent use. It’s a prescription drug not available over the counter.

Clearly it is a given that athletes need to take pain killers, but they cannot cross the line and take banned stuff.

The Voet story dealt with the use of far more powerful banned drugs, not just for racing but also in training. There is a passage where he describes giving amphetamines to ease rider’s discomfort on a long training ride in cold wet weather!

The rider later reported he had had a very enjoyable day, thank you very much.

The book was written by Voet to make a clean breast of his central part in

the Festina Drugs scandal uncovered at the start of the 1998 Tour de France.

It told of how he and others over the years had administered their “preparations” for selected top riders.

That really rocked the sport. Then when everyone thought the sport was squeaky clean, along came Armstrong in 1999, the cancer survivor, the hero, doped to win his seven consecutive Tours “because everyone was on it.”

That also rocked the sport. Nothing big since then.

The most telling thing about the publication of Voet’s book was the reaction from the rest of the sport. There was none – at least not publicly that I was aware of.  A telling silence.

But motor doping?  At least it will be safer than taking stimulants which are reckoned to have killed many athletes over the years.

 

Nah!