[tokai]

Opening paragraph is weird. Tacks on the road is not a dirty cheating trick but vandalism, potentially basque regional 'terrorism'. And motors has only been found use once (1) used by a junior rider, its a non-issue and everyone saying its not are spreading fud. If anything cycling is one of the sports with the least cheating. Even doping is minuscule now compared to most other sports.

This is gear shifter hack also not going to be an issue. If you wanted to ruing your rivals, you'll just pass them a bottle with trace amounts of growth hormones and their career is over. That doesn't happen, again showing that illegally cheating to destroy your opponents is super rare in cycling.

In the end its much easier to get a helper to crash out your rival than sitting ready hack him in the final sprint and hoping its just down to him and your own rider. Or just hack the whole sprint field and hope it wont get investigated I guess.

[sokoloff]

> cheating to destroy your opponents is super rare in cycling

If that's actually true, cycling has a long way to go to align its reputation with respect to cheating with the reality. My view as an outsider to cycling is much closer to "cheating is absolutely rampant" than "cheating is super rare".

[VeejayRampay]

this particular type of cheating is extremely rare

the kind of cheating that involves doping is rampant, because along with running, cycling is one of the sport where technique is the most dwarfed by pure physical abilities

[nwienert]

How do you know doping is rare?

[kristo]

I was a cyclist and my brother is now a professional. It's rare. There was a time when it was rampant and accepted. Then a time when it was not accepted but prevalent as the controls lagged severely behind the methods (Lance Armstrong). As controls have developed and the risk of detection has grown, it has become much more rare.

[nwienert]

This is a "trust me bro" reply though, there are constant developments in research chemicals that aren't easily detected. I know a top-20 boxer who thinks doping is common it's just harder to detect now.

Perhaps at lower levels, but at the highest levels it seems impossible to prove the negative.

[oefrha]

Amazing statement given that cycling is responsible for one of the biggest doping scandals ever (the biggest in some sense), across all sports.

[kristo]

It is also responsible for the most sophisticated and stringent anti doping controls of all time. Riders are now frequently blood tested multiple times per day during a race.

At this point, doping is far more widespread in most other sports than it is in cycling - it's just not tested for nearly as much