As my colleague Ian Austen reports, the development of a tiny motor that can be hidden inside an ordinary bicycle has led to rampant speculation from cycling fans and even some professional riders that secretly motorized bicycles have already been used in professional races.
The speculation spread online last week after a YouTube video blogger named Michele Bufalino produced a video that combined parts of a report on motorized bicycles from Italian television with footage from two races won by the Swiss cyclist Fabien Cancellara earleir this year. Mr. Cancellera has rejected the allegations, calling them “so stupid, I’m speechless.”
As Mr. Austen explains in his article, in Mr. Bufalino’s video, which is embedded above and has now been viewed nearly 2 million times on YouTube, he “slowed the action, somewhat like analyzing the Zapruder film, to focus on Cancellara’s hand movements. The video’s suggestion was that Cancellara pressed a hidden button to switch on a motor.”
Update: In addition to conspiracy theorists, the cycling blogosphere also includes a number of passionate fans who are quite sophisticated in technical and scientific terms. In response to this rumor, the bloggers at Science of Sport point to a very elaborate technical analysis of Mr. Cancellara’s sudden surge of power by a mechanical engineer who concluded that the power the cyclist seems to have generated as he surged into the lead is “believable by DYNAMIC riding standards.”
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