Let's be clear. This is 100% cheating in races and can not be condoned. Otoh, I don't get the outrage by someone like Eddy Merckx, calling for a lifelong ban on Femke Van Den Driessche , the young female cyclist that was found to have a bike with an seatpost motor in her materials stand. You have to realize Merckx himself was caught several times on doping, receiving only mild punishments, and also one of those ex-racers sticking 100% to the sport's traditional muerta on the subject. At least these motors are not actively preying on the health of the riders.
I assume that most people would feel that a motor in a manual bicycle is far more of an egregious rule-break than performance enhancing drugs, which are an aspect of every pro sport in the world.
That video of her bike doing donuts on its own makes a complete mockery of the sport.
I don't know if she should be banned for life, but certainly her career needs to be affected. 3 year ban or something.
I must be out of touch for sure. For me 'performance enhancing drugs' are not to be accepted as just 'an aspect of pro-sport'. Ruining (young) people's health, on top of making it near impossible for honest athletes to compete, makes drugs far more egregious than material cheats.
Absolutely, I don't understand how GP can causally accept how drugs damage thousands of people's health while harshly criticizing a different form of cheating which happens to use a different substrate than human flesh.
It's not about the health impact, it's about the idea that PEDs exist in every sport and are very well known and monitored for, so it's not as scandalous. Yes, it has a major health impact that trickles down to the youth participants and ruins lives, no one is debating that. The discussion is how big of a scandal it is.
Barry Bonds used steroids to hit some home runs, and he got an asterisk on his record. The 1919 Black Sox Scandal participants threw some games to make money and received lifelong suspensions from baseball and changed the history and rules of baseball forever because it made a mockery of the sport. Same thing with Pete Rose, he made a mockery of the sport. Bonds is currently a hitting coach for the Marlins, while Rose is doing commercials since he was banned for life in 1989.
Steroid and other PEDs are terrible and have awful impacts on the users health and are a bad example for kids, but their effects are still in line with the sports. What you get is a bit of a stronger cyclist, but still a cyclist. With a motor, you're making a mockery of the sport. It's not cycling anymore, it's now a motorsport. You're not participating in the sport anymore.
There are plenty of discussions that revolve around how bad PEDs are. This isn't one of them. This discussion is about how cheating using PEDs is different from cheating by removing yourself from the nature of the sport altogether.
