Magic Spanner

by Carlton Kirby

  Simple logic also informed the choice of filling tyres with helium rather than just air. It may not make the bike actually float up the mountain, but it could make the whole bike a bit lighter. In this climate of marginal gains, who knows if that extra fraction of a gram of weight saved could make that little difference?

  Bladed wheels came on to the market a few years ago. These had a quad spoke of carbon wings that produced a rotor. You could hear them coming from way off. These were expensive and so quite rare. Sadly (since they looked amazing), they were also deemed to be dangerous in the event of a crash. They were duly banned.

  Some technology is a little bit more basic. Time trial regulations for some time dictated that the rider’s saddle must be absolutely horizontal to avoid the rider gaining an advantage by pushing his backside against an angled seat. On health grounds, this rule has been amended and a pitch variation is now permitted of 10° off the horizontal. Before this allowance, riders struggled to stay planted on their seat and would often be seen taking a moment to shuffle their backside to the rear of the saddle. Tony Martin suffered from ‘butt-shuffle’ and resorted to rather basic technology to attempt to cure the problem: he glued some sandpaper to the saddle surface. All looked to be going well at first. But what couldn’t be seen was the sandpaper tearing through Tony’s shorts . . . then the chamois pad . . . and finally his blokey bits. It was a mess. Blood everywhere. I’m pleased to say that few riders have tried this again since. The saddle pitch rule change came as a relief.

  The Magic Wheel

  Perhaps a more significant advantage has been taken with some of the mechanical advances that have been hidden. In recent years, there have been some astounding time trials in the Grand Tours, and these have raised eyebrows. When someone like reigning World Time Trial Champion, Tony Martin, is beaten significantly, chins start to wag and questions are asked. In this regard, wheel technology has been the subject of much speculation.

  An aero disc on the back wheel can have huge benefits to the aero dynamism of a bike. It is solid and opaque. Could this double-sided disc with a hollow core be used to hide the inner workings of a rogue wheel mechanism?

  Organisers insist that all the wheels are the same Mavic model, to avoid any unfair advantage for a team using a more advanced wheel.

  There is, however, nothing in the rules that says a regular wheel cannot be employed inside a regulation disc wheel’s void. And anyway, what benefit could be gained from the extra weight such a method would employ? Well, let’s find out.

  There is a particular rear wheel that is rumoured to have been used at the very highest level. This wheel features a spoked wheel inside the regulation Mavic disc. At the heart of it was a magnetic hub with counterweights acting on the spokes, all nicely shrouded by the official solid aero cover.

  At speed, the counterweights disengaged from the hub and were flung out to the end of the specially strung spokes to sit at the rim of the wheel. This was said to have a gyroscopic effect, which added to the momentum of the turning wheel, thus giving the rider extra speed. When the rider slowed down – taking a corner, for instance – the weights slid down the spokes and returned to the magnetic hub. Magic.

  With the absence of scanners at the time, it is extremely difficult to prove that this technology was ever used, but there has been considerable speculation in France that some of the top teams employed such a wheel, particularly after some of the jaw-droppingly fast time trials seen during major races on occasion.

  Such suspicions fired up the French press whenever they thought an outstanding performance needed an explanation beyond the human. It led the French track cycling team’s director, Isabelle Gautheron, to accuse British Cycling of using ‘magic’ as opposed to Mavic wheels. What was it, the question went, that brought Team GB such success at the 2012 Olympics as well as some astounding performances in the Tour de France time trials?

  Of course, Sir Dave Brailsford, then performance director of British Cycling, loved the intrigue this speculation generated. The issue was raised at a press conference, where he said to a suddenly hushed press corps: ‘I’ll tell you what is so special about our wheels. Our wheels . . . are . . . perfectly. . . round.’ The next day, the French press was alive with questions about how such perfection could be achieved. What methods do les rosbifs have to ensure this impossible perfection they talk of?

  Not for the first time, Captain Dave had sunk a speculation fireboat heading his way. He successfully managed to ridicule the French claims – though it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that they had some validity, if only in the imagination of the defeated.

  Electrical Drive Systems

  Some of the first advances in electric motors within bikes were pioneered by the Italians, who developed a magnetic device hidden within the frame of the bike. Combined with a copper rim to the wheel, this worked as a rudimentary electric motor. Development of this primitive system was eventually abandoned. However, the idea remained alive, and with the power of modern batteries and a direct cam-drive system it is now possible to get an assisted ride while apparently sitting on board a perfectly regular-looking bike. Set up correctly, the motor and battery system is completely contained within the set tube. It can be started and stopped at the touch of a button, allowing the rider a boost when needed for an attack or to simply give them a rest.

  This is great news for, say, the club rider who wants to keep up with his fitter mates or a veteran riding with a younger group. So far, so good if all is declared and above board. But what if such a thing were used in the pro peloton? The monster is already with us, I’m afraid.

  The discovery of a hidden motor inside the frame of a spare bike used by Femke Van den Driessche at the U23 Cyclo-cross World Championships in January 2016 finally gave some credence to allegations that had been previously dismissed.

  Claims of motorised doping in pro cycling go back to 2010, when former pro rider and now head of the Italian Cycling national team Davide Cassani suggested that suspicious hand movements by Fabian Cancellara in that year’s Paris–Roubaix and Tour of Flanders indicated that he was engaging a switch to control a motor hidden within the frame of his bike. In a video available on YouTube, he alleges that the Swiss rider was able to power away from his fellow competitors immediately after moving his hand towards his right brake lever. Such claims were never proven.

  In the 2014 Vuelta, Ryder Hesjedal, riding for Garmin Sharp at the time, crashed on a descent on Stage 7. As he got up from the road, his bike spun round in a full circle as if it was being powered by its back wheel. It looked to run away from him as Hesjedal struggled to control the bike. It was explained as a high-speed freewheeling rear still moving quickly post-crash. The UCI moved to investigate and found nothing untoward.

  Rule Bending . . . the Grey Area

  We’ve pondered the dark side – basically, cheating. Time, then, to consider what are regarded as the ‘lesser crimes’ in the game of limiting time loss. The sheer frequency and cheekiness of these mean you may just get away with it.

  Cycling as a sport is, of course, magical but occasionally relies on the art of the illusion. This spell can be broken with clumsiness. As with all things in the world of magic, it may take those watching a little time to see how it’s done. Once you know the technique, you can figure out the trick. For that is what it is – a plain and simple attempt to confound the audience or referees with sleight of hand. And sometimes, if you do it well and don’t take the mickey, even the commissaires, despite knowing the trick, might not mind!

  That said, having first referred to the ‘magic spanner’ in 1996, I’m rather proud that it is now a generic term for a bit of trickery. Let’s see how the magic works and consider a few other methods of helping a struggling or unfortunate rider back into the pack.

  The team mechanic is hard-working, up early and to bed late, the unsung hero of the team. Washing bikes, fettling them, racking and repairing them. He is the only guy, apart from the rider, who is allowed a p
hysical input during a race; he’s the chap with the belly and baggy shorts and fingers as agile as spitting pork sausages on a hot skillet. He’s on his knees a lot, frantically trying to replace the rear wheel of the team’s star rider who is standing there, hands on skinny hips, with an expression that easily decodes as ‘Get a bleedin’ move on, Colin, FFS.’ After the repair, our Colin can push a rider from a standing start before jumping back in the car. That push-off is the only physical assist allowable in open competition – as detailed in UCI Directive 138, Paragraph 6, Subsection 27d – or something like that, you get the idea.

  Well, those may well be the rules, but what comes next may well get, ahem, a little bit ‘bendy’.

  The rider is now up and gone, but the peloton is in the distance. Any energy he can save right now might well be vital to his chances later. This can only mean one thing: the magic is about to begin!

  It’s time to engage in a fire-dance with the commissaires. You might get burned with a sanction, but it’s worth the risk because you may just get away with it. The secret is: Don’t push it. If you don’t make it too obvious, a blind eye will be turned. Go heavy, and you will be sanctioned. It’s a risky business. So good luck, everybody . . . and here we go.

  Phase 1: The Magic Spanner

  The mechanic is now back in the car. He’s had his full body moment in front of the cameras. Now it’s time to go hang just half of his fine figure out of the car’s right rear window.

  The rider drifts over as the car pulls up alongside. Our mechanic, belly now folded over the open rear window frame, checks one of two things: the seat stem or the rear brakes. The giveaway is that if it was a front wheel puncture, there is no need to check the rear brakes or adjust for ‘rub’ on the rim. Anyway, out comes the magic spanner and an ‘adjust’ takes place while the driver of the car hits the accelerator. While the mechanic’s hands are on the bike, the cyclist is magically propelled forward at pace via automotive assistance, to regain time lost due to a racing incident.

  • Giveaway: Front wheel change and a rear brake check.

  • Top tip: Front wheel change? Adjust the saddle stem only.

  Phase 2: The Sticky Bottle

  Obviously, due in part to the stress of having a puncture, it is time for a drink. It is amazing how thirsty riders get on climbs! Any uphill section clearly generates a mighty thirst. Time to go to the left-hand side of the car and take a bottle. These bottles have an amazing magnetic quality. As soon as the riders’ hands touch them, the magnetism begins. Their grip, and those of the car drivers, resemble that of an electrician who’s got it wrong! They both hold on for dear life as the accelerator is hit again. Only when 55km/h (34mph) is reached on a 20% climb does the vice-like grip of the car driver release, leaving the rider free to cage the bottle. I’ve always pondered this law of cycling physics.

  • Giveaway: On release, the rider immediately chucks the full bottle into a hedge.

  • Top tip: Take at least one swig before launching it.

  Phase 3: Drafting

  ‘He’s back in the cars,’ goes the commentary call. . . meaning he’s made it to the line of team vehicles sitting behind the peloton. Crisis nearly over. There is just one last piece of this dance of distraction with the race authorities: auto-assist. Get your arse as close to the bumper of every single car in the line of support vehicles as you can. Take them one by one as you move seamlessly towards the back of the pack of riders you were so unreasonably separated from through no fault of your own.

  • Giveaway: Getting too close to a car and actually freewheeling.

  • Top tip: Become animated. Hurl a few insults at the car in front of you as if the vehicle is actually holding you up. Use your arms in a rather flamboyant Italian way. This can help.

  Black and White – or Grey?

  Boundaries are strange things. They are markers of the acceptable. Going beyond these will draw scrutiny at best and a ban at worst. But boundaries are there to be approached and the movement of these lines can indeed come if – and only if – it is seen to benefit the sport. Clearly, taking a train is one thing and developing a cheeky skinsuit is entirely another. Strange that, for some, this all falls within a single category: cheating.

  The fact is that some teams have enjoyed a great deal of success. This makes them a target for scrutiny, and a certain false equivalence pops up. Fans and journalists who support teams that regularly get beaten cry foul too readily. Cycling so often appears to be a sport full of malcontents. I wonder if this is because in this sport it could be said there are 175 ‘losers’ in a race and just one winner. That is a lot of bitterness right there.

  Speaking to an Italian journalist, I once asked why the home fans are so forgiving of the likes of Marco Pantani and other alleged drugs cheats. He said the public view went like this: ‘So he took a few potions to light up the world for us. So what? He did it for us, not for himself.’ It’s a tainted view, of course. A boundary crossed, sometimes with tragic consequences.

  Rules to combat cheating were established in 1905, as you have learned. Sixty years later, the first detailed anti-doping laws were adopted. Since then, those who run cycling have had to keep pace with a sport playing on the edge of the acceptable in terms of technology and medicine. Currently the Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE) rules are proving almost impossible to fathom in terms of where the boundary lies. These rules allow certain drugs to be used for therapeutic reasons, such as for the treatment of asthma. There is a limit, though. Take too much, and you are going to be punished. But when and how severely? It seems nobody knows.

  The situation means that teams are almost duty-bound to push the limits of what is acceptable. Some of these actions are allowed while others are rejected and punished. The fact remains that cycling is about winning, and to win you have to dance along a line that defines the acceptable. Step over it, and you are in trouble. But the search for the boundary goes on.

  17

  There is No Money!

  A few years ago, a wealthy Russian businessman, one Oleg Tinkov, decided that he was going to change the financial model of professional cycling from the inside. First he had to buy a team. He did so at the end of 2013, to create Tinkoff–Saxo, and began to stack it with massive stars like Alberto Contador, then a five-time Grand Tour winner, and Peter Sagan, soon to become a multiple World Champion. After sinking several million euros into his team, he set about working out how he was going to get his money back – and more.

  His plan was to kick in the door of cycling – and ASO, organisers of the Tour de France, in particular. He was then going to take over the big pot of money and share it out among the teams and cut down the share controlled by the race organisers. But, after inviting himself to the party, he discovered that in fact there was no money. What he found out was that organisations like ASO in France and RCS Sport in Italy operate to modest profit levels. They see themselves as historic institutions and the guardians of cycling’s heritage. There is not as much money in cycling as many people think.

  The Tour de France is what Général de Gaulle called Un Grand Projet. He once said that if France was not engaged in a project of major global significance, the nation would retire to the cafés in a state of malaise while questioning the ranking of the first republic in the world order.

  So merci beaucoup, Général, for at least defining the idea of a truly global event, but also ensuring that what Le Tour actually gets, more than any other race, is a whole lot of government support.

  While some races are limited or even crippled by the cost of security, the Tour de France has none to pay. The cost of policing and road closures is covered by national and regional government. It’s accounted for in local taxes as a cultural event. Want Paris closed in the centre with grandstands laid on by the Mairie? Pas de problème. Need a subsidised helicopter or five? Pourquoi pas? Paid for by the Ministry of Tourism. And do you need a dedicated motorcycle police fleet? Avec plaisir. All of these are not low cost items on a Grand Tour shop
ping list. In fact, without the subsidy, the Tour would resemble . . . well . . . the Giro. The Grand Tours in Italy and Spain do indeed get support, but this is modest in comparison.

  What the Tour de France gets is unequivocal national support. Everyone in France is into it. OK, the odd nutter isn’t, but everyone is certainly aware it’s going on. This is not the sense one gets with either the Giro or Vuelta. A perfect example is that residents of Rome regard the Giro as a Milanese event, which is why the city only occasionally closes its streets for the ‘nuisance’ that is supposedly the national tour. Rome and other cities have far more important things to be getting on with than some other city’s event, grazie mille. Italy, as you can tell, remains a bit divided. As for Spain and La Vuelta? Well, Spain is just plain skint. End of.

  So what Tinkov thought of as a monster organisation in the form of the ASO was in fact the conduit for the French government to put on a national show. This wasn’t some financial leviathan that could be leveraged into paying teams more of the TV rights. There was, and remains, no big money chest in the Paris HQ. Cycling is not a rich sport.

  Tinkoff wasn’t the first cycling team to close shop – as it did in November 2016 – and it certainly won’t be the last. IAM went the same year and more recently Garmin had to appeal to crowdfunding to stay afloat, until Education First stepped in as a sponsor. It’s tough out there. Even Team Sky declared 2019 its final season before a sponsor change. Partially a sense of ‘job done’, I suspect, but the huge cost of maintaining the super team must have been a consideration. Team Ineos is the new incarnation.

  So how come the most watched sporting event of the year – namely, the Tour de France – makes so little money? Well, there are no stadiums. Our Maracanã or Camp Nou is a mountain roadside: the Tourmalet, Alpe d’Huez or Mont Ventoux. These are public places free to anyone who cares to turn up in a campervan with a stale baguette and bottle of plonk. No one pays to watch road cycling, least of all the Grand Tours.