Survival of the sneakiest

Could there be a better metaphor for the corruption that now pervades all top-level sport than the use of motors in professional cycling? It’s so perfectly shameless. If you’re going to cheat by finding illicit ways in which to enhance your performance, as virtually all sportspeople today are forced to do (we’ll come back to that), why mess about with half-measures? Find a motor and strap it on. Undying glory and unimaginable wealth are just the other side of that mountain. Open that throttle, baby!

In December last year, Istvan ‘Stefano’ Varjas, a Hungarian engineer who claims to have invented the technology necessary to conceal a near-silent engine in a racing bicycle, gave an interview to CBS’s 60 Minutes, in which he said he first sold his engines to an unnamed individual in 1998 for $2 million, agreeing to ten-year exclusivity and silence as part of the deal. He even gave a demonstration for the cameras of how the technology worked.

In January last year, a motor was found in the bike of the European cyclo-cross champion Femke Van den Driessche. Two months later, footage was captured using thermal cameras at two races in Italy that appeared, very convincingly it must be said, to show heat patterns within frames and wheels consistent with the use of motors in the bikes of at least seven professional riders.

But if some professional riders are using motors, how are the authorities not preventing it? Surely it cannot be hard to detect a motor in a bicycle. Sadly, as is the case with anything involving cheating in top-level cycling, the answer is far from straightforward. Many insiders believe that the Union Cycliste Internationale, cycling’s governing body, lacks the appetite to uncover yet another damaging scandal in its sport.