Thermal Cameras Will Look for "Mechanical Doping" Cheaters at the Tour de France
There is no shortage of performance enhancing drugs being used to cheat in the world of sports, just look at last night's episode of Last Week Tonight. But in the world of bicycle racing, so-called mechanical doping is on the rise, and the Tour de France will be whipping out thermal cameras in an attempt fight it.
Mechanical doping-also known as "cramming a tiny motor in the frame of your bike"-first started getting mainstream attention after Belgian cyclist Femke Van den Driessche had her bike confiscated after the Cyclocross World Championships and an inspection revealed a tiny motor hidden inside the frame.
Then, a joint investigation by Italy's Corriere della Sera and France's Télévisions Stade 2 turned up footage to suggest this isn't uncommon, spotting suspicious heat signatures in a number of racers' bikes by gazing at them with thermal cameras. The publications declined to name the suspected cheaters since the evidence merely raised suspicions, but now the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) will be adopting similar techniques to try and spot cheaters on this year's Tour de France.
According to BBC Sport, thermal cameras in use during the race will be portable, mounted on the back of roadside motorcycles. In addition, officials will also be scanning bikes with a "magnetic resonance system" at the start and end of the event.
The machines used for mechanical doping are certainly impressive bits of engineering, generally featuring tiny driveshafts that fit into a bike's frame beneath the seat post, or possibly even magnetic drives that use coils in the bike's frame to interact with magnets in the wheels.
But no matter the level of stealth and miniaturization, these solutions all throw off some sort of heat, which makes them simple to spot with machine vision. So if the cheaters want to keep cheating, they'll have to come up with a way to defy the laws of physics.
