Motors are acceptable for this.
Motherfucker.
I honestly don’t like swearing in an Article, much less using such a word to open an article, but seriously. Motherfucker. A motor discovered in an U23 rider’s bike at the Cyclocross World Championships has to be the lowest of the low that anyone can go. I’m so pissed off, I’m rhyming. Which itself makes me madder than a hatter.
I have a pretty lenient stance on doping, which I hold to fairly wide criticism. I believe that the path towards doping is full of shadows and gradual steps towards the darkness. It is easy for me to imagine a young, ambitious rider who has sacrificed education and other vocations for the chance to become a Pro Cyclist, who is taken under the wing of an older, more experienced rider and to whom is explained the ways of the sport. If I was 18 and following that path, I cannot say with certainty what choice I would make, given the limited perspective one would have under those circumstances. While I hate doping and wish for clean sport, I hold limited judgement over those who have strayed down that path.
But we ride bicycles for the pleasure of propelling ourselves along the road under our own power. We push the pedals and we go faster, it is as simple as that; the motor resides in our heads and in our hearts. Performance enhancing drugs will, to various degrees, fine-tune and modify that motor, but there remains alive a notion that even a doped rider is holding true to this basic notion.
Competition is about finding out who is the superior athlete, it is as simple as that. We train, we fine-tune our equipment, we learn the strategy and tactics required to rise to the top. Doping certainly obscures that concept, but that a rider would abandon this fundamental principle of our sport by utilizing a motor in their bike seems to me an order of magnitude removed. It is gratuitous to the extent that there is no possible justification apart from an unabashed desire to win over all else.
This is bike racing, not motorcycle racing. For fucks sake.
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I have always joked about Downhill MTB bikes being motorcycles without the motors given the frame design and brakes, suspension, etc...so, so repulsed at the notion of adding motors to skinny tire bikes...
I'm not sure I hold that doping the bike is somehow worse than doping the body, but I do hold that it's bullshit that it's come to this sorry state where motors are being fitted...
Having done a small amount of work on teams, the mechanic absolutely had to have known about the motor - that fucker should be banned too, along with her dad.
@Oli
The only, ONLY thing that makes the motor worse in my mind is this...even doped...the rider still has to put in the actual effort. YES..they are enhanced, and that is totally wrong, but they are still 100% making the effort. With a motor in the bike..that is no longer the case. They are making less effort than every other rider around them.
I had the same knee jerk reaction, but everyone is innocent until proven otherwise. If Femke is speaking the truth about this being a friend's bike the only thing you can blame her and her team with is really bad PR and damage control. Everyone else has to eat crow - and her "friend" has a lot of explaining to do...
hmmm, one is not worse or more worse than the other, both are cheating. If I was a boxer and used HGH to develop bigger muscles or put a horseshoe in my glove the fella on his back getting a 10 count would just call me a cheat.
The "friend's bike" excuse probably tops Gibi Simoni's cocaine double positive coming from a dentist's injection and then from Peruvian lollies from his mum. But he got off, so maybe Femke does too!
It makes perfect sense to me that:
1. A male buddy could saunter into the pits at the cyclocross worlds with his bike;
2.Said male's bike has the same measurements as hers, and a ladies seat (my guess - if it was set up differently, that might be another story - which I reckon we might have heard by now);
3. The friend's bike used to be Femke's but then the guy bought it and must've put a motor in it - and I guess that means he put the ladies seat back on?
3. He left it there and disappeared.
That sort of thing happens all the time.
Yeah, I don't believe the "friend's bike" excuse for a nano-second.
Cheating of any kind is low down shit. I don't rank one over the other but this is just as bad and deserves a lifetime ban
Her brother apparently is serving as ban for Epo. Do agree with the above though that when it comes to riders not even riding their bikes the whole sport is damaged... Christ is a bad as virtually climbing Alpe D"huez in your living room on the trainer and claiming a strava segment time! What's wrong with actually working hard and being jacoby with your best effort.
Correction - now a fella has claimed the bike - we have a fall guy!
@Marcus
Be interesting to see the two of them side by side........