I don't think they are widespread because a) I think they are pretty expensive b) I can't image anyone using one of these really thinks they have accomplished anything. At least the dopers still have to train. You might as well call an Uber and get off a couple miles early. Much easier and cheaper.

You are so wrong on b) it is not even funny.

Looks like a bicycle...so it is a bicycle...just happens that I have The Best (it even has an expensive motor)!

Same 'customers' who buy $10K bikes.

thermal camera's are getting pretty cheap, in fact the latest CAT phone has a themal camera,

in terms of it being to hard to check... why not just check the top grouping riders, say the top 10 in each group, or if thats too many people then the podium finishers for each group. compulsary inspection for the bike ridden.

same should be done for meds.

I can't /haven't watched the video right now so apologies if this is explained there, but, how is thermal imaging used to detect the presence of a motor in a bike?
The motor/battery will only differ significantly from ambient temperatures during or for a time after charging/discharging the battery and/or running the motor. While riding there is significant forced convective cooling over the seat-tube or any other frame tube that might be carrying these components so they will cool fairly quickly. On a 70.3 or long distance triathlon bike leg it would be quite feasible to use a motor to cheat out on the course and stop using it early enough to let the bike cool before entering transition. Perhaps the idea is to photograph or film all competitiors with infra red cameras throughout the race?
It seems to me that there are many ways a cheat could reduce the likelihood of detection too. For example heat sinks connecting the motor/battery to external heat conductive components like a chain catcher or guard, BB cups and the front derailleur hanger. It wouldn't be too difficult to hide a water cooling system to allow the rider to empty a water bottle into the frame to cool the motor/battery before draining back out again. Done well this would be difficult to detect without a very careful inspection of the bike.

Who is going to make/sell this?

Motors in bikes have legit uses, and can be easily produced/sold. Doping products have legit uses, and are made for that, then some are diverted to doping.

How is that - the production/marketing going to work for a cooling system to hide motors?

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http://www.jt10000.com/

I didn't say anything about it being a commercial product. I could make one quite easily if I was so inclined.
Let's see...My Felt IA has a "Calpac" bento box. I could drill a small hole in the corner of that right down the bottom, pour water into the storage area and it would act as a funnel. Water would exit the hole into the down tube. You could attach a small tube to the hole to bring the water to a cooling jacket on the motor and battery or you could make it less obvious by just letting the water trickle into the downtube and then gather it lower down with another funnel to guide it into the cooling jacket. The configuration of the Felt IA perhaps makes it particularly easy, but most if not all bikes could have small modifications or additions made to allow something similar to be done. For example any bike with top tube mounting bosses could employ the holes or the bolts themselves as a water injection point. Any ETap bike with unused cable ports could use them to inject water, etc.

There's nothing terribly complex about this that someone with a little technical ability couldn't put together in a few evenings of tinkering. Are most triathletes so obsessed with buying stuff that they think it's impossible to do things for yourself?

That's easy?

Nice straw man: easy vs impossible.

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http://www.jt10000.com/

Yes, easy.
Of course it's all relative and depends on your background.
It might take a little time, as in several hours, but for many people it would not be difficult at all.

What strawman am I creating? You honestly have me puzzled.

I just did IMLP. I saw zero fat guys flying up the hills. I saw an awful lot of absolutely jacked 50+ men AND women. I don't think motors are the biggest doping problem in tri, they certainly aren't going to help you run. That being said, they have the bikes a day ahead of time, so they should look for motors if the technology exists to do so.

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Dimond Bikes Superfan

even a cheap thermal camera has the kind of sensitivity that you are going to be able to see a motor and batterys easily, forget about cooling them, they will pick up the tem diferencial of the water in the frame,

i'll post a pic up in a bit, but literally they will show heat on somthing that you have held in your hand for a few seconds.

cheap hand held drill, i would immagine this is goijng to be somwhere in the ball park of the wattage of a doping motor, this is after about a minuites use, apart from the heat from the motor, note the heat in the hand grip from body temp, and the heat showing from the batterys.

and this is just a pic from the Cat smart phone...

http://www.catphones.com/...hones/s60-smartphone

This is why I would call for lifetime bans for motors.

"We have your bikes one day in advance. We will use the best available technology to look for motors. We are only handling a maximum of 3,000 bikes. We can search randomly, search them all or target test; we won't tell you which we are doing. If we find a motor, the bike owner is out for life."

What kind of moron would turn over a bike with a motor? I would take my chances with doping long before I would turn in a motorized bike.

You can get a handheld non contact infra red thermometer at Harbor Freight for $27 that is sensitive enough to find a warm/hot spot in a bike frame from an electric motor that has been recently used. My guess is there is a decent chance that was as sophisticated as the "thermal imaging" used got. And even that is not the easiest way to find bike motors. iPhones/iPads actually have built in magnetic field detectors (why i don't know) and the UCI just uses an app that "sees" the magnets in the motor.

Yes, it's true you can easily detect small differences in temperature. But, as I said earlier, a motor or battery will only have a significantly different temperature if they have been charged/discharged or run recently. When idle and exposed to airflow this heat will dissipate. Photographing the bike in transition in steady state temperatures will not tell you anything. My query was whether the idea was to photograph/film people's bikes out on the course.
You say thermal cameras can show heat on something you held in your hand for a few seconds, and that's true. What about 20mins later?
So when you say "you are going to be able to see a motor and batterys easily", what is it that you are going to see and when will you see it? Where will the temperature difference come from?

You could perhaps heat or cool the frame and look for areas of higher thermal mass (by looking for areas that are slower to respond with a temperature change) but I don't think that's a practical way to test without excessive time and logistical costs and would probably not yield a definitive answer anyway.

So, to clarify: I am not debating the ability of infra red cameras to detect temperature differences. I'm asking when and where the cameras will be used and whether there will be a temperature difference to see. On course and in use, in transition before, in transition after....?

Well, the amount of drafting in triathlon certainly allows us to say that cheating is rampant...

True, except we're talking PED usage and hidden motors. Drafting hasn't been mentioned, and it's a whole other kettle of fish that gets flogged on here on a regular basis. Even with drafting, it's not "Lance Armstrong" levels anyways.

THIS. question is though, if they turn the motor off before rolling into T2, can you still see it light up?

I agree that it's not LA level, but if I recall the post you were answering to, it was referring to rampant cheating.
My guess is that many triathletes could easily get the same time gains out of blatant drafting as they would using EPO.
I'm referring to these races where you see large groups, hanging out together like it's a weekend group ride.

Edit: you actually did say "I would be surprised if cheating is as rampant..." :-)
so, yes, obviously it is that rampant.

[quote FrancoisEdit: you actually did say "I would be surprised if cheating is as rampant..." :-)
so, yes, obviously it is that rampant.[/quote]
Yes, but you missed the posts before it too that provide context.

And still......no. It's not as rampant as the Lance Armstrong era. That's a time when essentially *everyone* was cheating. Certainly the top 1% of professional racers were all (as history has shown) taking PEDs. Probably more.

Do you think *all* of the top 1% of tri pros are taking PED's? They aren't. Are some? I suppose, they get caught occasionally. But in the Lance era they *all* were.

So.....even if you add drafting (which again from the context wasn't the case) it's still not as rampant.

I would lay money on it, you can practically see down to a fraction of a degree, I would say somthing would stay noticable for a fair while, especially as you can prety much see " thorogh" somthing to the core temp so wind would only cool the outer frame and the centre would still show as hot.

The ITU does do mechanical fraud tests. There were sections added to the rulebook around the process and procedures for it, and they have been training and equipping a number of officials to do the testing (and this is likely to continue to grow). I'm not sue the number of tests that have been completed, and whether they're all elite, or a combo of Elite and Age Group. But I would suspect that if you're doing an ITU worlds event (Penticton or Rotterdam) there will be some testing of bikes.

It's actually a lot easier to control in Tri vs. Cycling, with athletes having to check their bikes in, often the day before, there's ample opportunity for testing, and there's no ambiguity of it being a "spare training bike" since bike changes are illegal...

And I agree that there should be lifetime bans for mechanical fraud (I also think there should be lifetime bans for doping (if it can't be proven to be accidental) as well).

It helps you run if it lets you ride, physically, at a lower percentage of your FTP for a shorter period of time.

Let's say you have an FTP of 300 watts and you somehow sneak a 150 watt motor into your bike and a big enough battery pack to last for two hours. Let's just say you'd normally ride at 70% of your FTP and have a bike split of 2:30. You could ratchet that down to 50% of your FTP and with the motor on your bike split would be almost fourteen minutes faster. So you'd be on the bike for about 10% less time at an exertion that is almost 30% lower. I can guarantee you'll run faster.

I agree with you though that EPO, HGH, and T are much bigger issues for the sport. Frankly I think this is one more argument for the category system as it would allow race organizations to focus their efforts.

Here is an article on the various ways you can detect a motor in a bike. Looking for heat works but the main way testing is done is scanning bikes before or after the race with an iPhone or iPad. There are several off the shelf commercial apps that will detect the magnetic field generated by an electric motor (even if it is off) just by waving the phone within a couple inches of the frame.

https://www.wired.com/2016/02/clever-ways-to-catch-a-pro-cyclist-cheating-with-a-hidden-motor


Frankly, it is so easy and cheap (basically free) to "test" for motors that unless the get way more sophisticated, it is never going to be a big deal in high level cycling and it should not be in low level cycling either. It is akin to testing human doping if you could do it by just by waiving an iPhone in someone's face at registration.

The real danger of electric motors, and I have already seen this, is someone on an e-Bike with 15 mph handling skills trying to mix it with the local group ride at 25 mph.

On the other hand, I may just power up in about 10 years when I can no long mix it up with the boys on the coffee shop rides on my own power ;-) I'd let everyone know and use my new "powers" only for good (e.g taking long hard pulls for the guys at key moments) and obviously never in a race but little motors on bikes hold a lot of promise too.

You keep telling us how great these cameras are (which no-one has debated) and yet you haven't yet answered my questions about how they are used to detect motors or batteries. So, again, when are/should they to be used in order to ensure the motor or battery are at a different temperature to the rest of the bike and therefore detectable?


No you cannot see through something. The camera is detecting light reflected from the surface of the object you're photographing or filming. The only difference between this and a normal camera is the wavelength of the light involved. The camera is observing infra red rather than visible spectrum light and then translating it to visible spectrum wavelengths to display it so that we can see it.
It would take some time for heat to dissipate after you stopped running a motor. The time required for a thermal camera to become difficult or useless would depend on a number of factors. Primarily, power usage, motor efficiency, battery impedance, speed controller efficiency, thermal mass of components, means of cooling (you could use heat sinks, thermal adhesives, water cooling, etc to accelerate cooling), ambient temperature, solar gain, frame colour and reflectivity, wind speed and direction, cycling speed, humidity, camera sensitivity, frame uniformity.......I'm sure there's a few more.

Have you ever taken an infra red photo of a bike straight after a ride? I haven't, but I'm curious how uniform the frame temperature would be, especially how it would differ from bike to bike and with changes in weather or course profile. While a camera can certainly detect differences of fractions of a degree, looking for differences at a very small scale means there will be a lot more noise in the signal and it may be far less obvious what you're seeing. My guess is a long course racer could use a motor mid bike leg and leave the motor and battery to cool for an hour or more before T2, dribble some sweat and water on the frame and it may not be detectable at all. That's without even getting into any fancy cooling systems or heat camouflage paint schemes.