You cannot be serious.....

Time for a John McEnroe-style rant I think.

Surely you've seen this post now, the one about "motorized doping'". To be honest, the headline didn't make sense to me at first, but I do speed-read and sometimes have to go back to make sure what I thought I'd read, I had actually read. It didn't make sense the second time either. The gist of the story is motors have been allegedly secreted in pro bikes, perhaps to assist the bottom bracket rather than directly driving the rear wheel a la the Trek Ride+. The electric assist is used for the first half of the race to conserve energy and then the rider switches the a regular bike for the finale.

Puts a new spin on Di2 doesn't it; we have to perfect electronic shifting so there's an excuse for mounting a dirty great big battery on a sub-kilo carbon frame?! Concealed cables aren't aero, it's so we can drive the motor. The UCI can make them pee into all the bottles they want, check for drug doping and gene doping to make sure no-one is augmenting the motor but bastards will never even think about checking for a real motor!

Can it actually be true? The last I checked it was on velonation.com AND cyclingnews.com, two independent sites, but this doesn't mean anything as they could be cut-n-pasting from one another so they don't get left behind in this 24/7 news culture. In such a culture, this blog-post is already irrelevant and OBE (well more irrelevant and OBE than usual), but this blog is for fun, those other guys get paid to blog.

Anyway, back to the story's verity. Can it be true? Has the sport I love really descended to such Ealing comedy-farce levels? I've seen Carry On films with more plausible plots. This is surely stretching credulity.

The alternative is not more appealing, and rather exonerating the sport, merely excoriates it. Let's assume this was an off-the-cuff joke to Hein or Pat or even between a couple of journos and a mechanic. Instead of being ignored as a joke, the sport's reputation is so bad, the joke can be regarded as Plausible and investigated, if only through trial-by-media.

Perhaps we should get Adam and Jamie to check it out; they are independent and seem to have the trust of the public at large! More than your average pro cyclist, or so it seems. Plausible, Confirmed or Busted could equally apply to the JATO rocket car, can a falling penny kill you, water-heater rocket, exploding toilet or any Giro, Vuelta or Tour win since the early 90s!

So what to do. Well, I think I'll start by finishing following today's Giro stage; the silly buggers let a 58-up break get 17 minutes on them and now the pink-and-hairless one is getting all worried, and try not to think about drug doping, gene doping or motorized doping. But I'll tell you one thing. Any one of them gets a bike-change at the top of the last climb, I'm handing it my cyclists' card, will stop shaving my legs and taking up competitive tiddlywinks. Grrrrr...

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