Thought… couldn’t this trick be used for a concealed electric bike for places where these are limited by annoying laws? Cops usually aren’t equipped with xray machines, and tend to be rather dumb.
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Regarding the second video, the gradient of the road is not clear from the camera angle of a motorbike driving upon the same road - I’d suggest that, judging from the cyclists movements just before the spill, they’re actually going downhill and that’s why the crashed bike is swinging around. The video is typical conspiracy theorist material - repeating a small segment several times while heaping suspicion upon it, and using slow motion or other cinematic techniques to obscure rather than reveal how suspicious the footage really is. I’m surprised he didn’t add a sinister bassy synth buzz to the reel for extra X-Files points.
That said, motor doping is a fairly persistent allegation at the moment and the Vivax system seems to be built around obscurity - they don’t produce a battery pack big enough to be obvious despite the inroads into the cargo bike market they could make with this solution, otherwise.
Would the added weight of the batteries being carried be worth the boost? I’d suggest that the advantage of the occasional help during climbs would be outweighed, no pun intended. I don’t think that you could run the motor continually without arousing suspicion, and the increased weight and weird handling, heft, and sound of a bike with essentially solid tubes would present more frequent opportunities to arouse suspicion.
More likely you’d go for as small a battery as you thought useful, so that you could maximise the discreetness of the boost and just gain an edge on climbs rather than some kind of Ben Johnson style freak win.
I also think that the most obvious application of this kind of fraud would be in 24 hour or night-time mountain bike races, where powerful lights are used in conjunction with big, separate power packs - much less chance of arousing suspicion.
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an exciting glimpse into the origins of the frauenfelder sports crime syndicate! Scorsese should direct.
This site has the most annoying ads. Couple of popups and a video ad where the sounds starts playing before the article even loads. Not such a good men project.
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I don’t know about professional cyclists and racing, but I added a 250 Watt hub motor and some lithium iron phosphate batteries to my bike. Adds 10 pounds or so, but well worth it to my aging knees.
Yes, if I were a professional cheat I would figure the exact trade offs between weight, peak power and such. I was just estimating how much power one could reasonably conceal within a standard bike frame.[quote=“AnonyMouse, post:63, topic:73290”]
I also think that the most obvious application of this kind of fraud would be in 24 hour or night-time mountain bike races, where powerful lights are used in conjunction with big, separate power packs - much less chance of arousing suspicion.
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Hmm… seems like you’ve given this sort of cheating a fair amount of thought… 
just kidding!
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I bet people who cheat regularly and justify it to themselves can come up with a ton of hot air for you to breathe while the jury is out. 
and then somehow wound up in her race trailer.
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a rare show of sportsmanship
the daughter of the race official was a cyclist participating in the race?
I’d use it to rest outside of climbs while maintaining a race pace. You’d get more out of it that way IMO, easily spinning a gear that has zero resistance but still zipping along, making you fresh for your climbs.
But that’s on the road, off-road or cyclo-cross I’m not sure which would be best, but I’d definitely use it on approaches. What sort of torque are we talking about with something like this? Would it help me much on a set of steep switchbacks? Hell for technical singletrack you’d need to pre-ride with it, train with it if it made much of a difference, or you might end up smashing yourself up a bit for misjudging stuff.
On the road, this thing could make a YUGE difference if properly applied.
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Some cyclocross riders use steel bikes, but they’re long gone in the professional road scene; they haven’t been a thing since the 90s, IIRC.
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No, that bike would never have been run over if it didn’t have its own power. The bike virtually stopped moving before the rear wheel pushed it into the path of the motorbike. There’s no way weight on the pedal did that; there’s far too much energy in that wheel for that, and at any rate it won’t happen with the bars under the bike like they were.
I’m a bike mechanic, BTW.
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And after they go though the x-ray machine a few times, the bikes can be used for 24 hour marathon rides. No need for lights, as the bikes themselves will be glowing nicely.
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The weight of the motor and batteries isn’t a big deal…you can make these bikes incredibly light, much lighter than the rules say, so shaving off enough to compensate for the motor would be relatively easy.
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You need MUCH higher photon energy to knock particles out of nuclei and induce radioactivity. Then you are outside of the x-ray range and well within hard gamma radiation. To photodisintegrate deuterium you need at least 2 megaelectronvolts, for heavier nuclei it is about 10 or more. Cf. x-ray tubes, which are operating at tens to low hundreds of kiloelectronvolts.
That, or neutrons.
In both cases, the isotopes created are usually rather short-lived.
You’d also need some phosphor paint to convert the emitted beta/gamma to visible range. Silver-doped zinc sulfide was used in those old radium dials.
Or you could use some glow-in-the-dark paint, which can react to x-ray; the glowy stickers are used by x-ray experimenters as a poor man’s fluorescent screen. The glow would however be rather weak and unusable as a lamp.
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Well, all the pros seem to be going down the electronic shifting route now, which to my mind is cheating, too - I prefer all the mechanical elements of a bike to be powered by muscles. I have looked at boost motors extensively for a cargo bike project I have in mind, and the seat tube/bottom bracket position looks best to me because it permits you to fit hub gears at the rear wheel and a dynamo hub for lighting at the front. It may also permit the user to _inadvertentl_y circumvent the maximum legal speed allowed with an electro boost, but that is up to the user to regulate. The only cargo bikes I’ve seen so far that were able to combine electro boost, gears and dynohub were the Urban Arrow, and they used a really expensive bottom bracket gearbox.
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And I’m a framebuilder - I suspect that what we really need is a physicist.
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I wonder what kind of bar there is for professing to be a cyclist. As with anything else, one might suppose it is lesser than actually doing so!
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