Former professional cyclist Phil Gaimon has accused Fabian Cancellara of cheating by using a hidden motor in his bike.
Gaimon, who retired at the end of the 2016 season after a decade in the peloton, made the claim in his recently published autobiography, Draft Animals.
The American singled out Cancellara’s race-winning performance in the 2008 edition of Milan-San Remo as being particularly suspicious.
In his book, Gaimon wrote: “I dismissed it until I heard his former teammates talk about certain events where Cancellara had his own mechanic, his bike was kept separate from everyone else's, and he rode away from a ‘who's who’ of dopers.
“When you watch the footage, his accelerations don't look natural at all, like he's having trouble staying on the top of the pedals.
“That fucker probably did have a motor,” he added.
Cancellara, a three-time winner of both the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix and world time trial champion on four occasions, has always denied allegations of using a concealed motor.
Suspicions he may have been using illegal mechanical assistance were at their height in 2010, when the Swiss rider rode away from Tom Boonen on the Muur van Geraardsbergen to take a stunning victory at the Tour of Flanders and followed it up a week later by winning Paris-Roubaix.
Shortly afterwards, Italian ex-pro turned TV pundit Davide Cassani – now coach of Italy’s national team – demonstrated on television how he believed a pro cyclist could use a hidden motor to gain an unfair advantage.
World cycling’s governing body the UCI has stepped up the number of tests carried out on bikes since a concealed motor was found in the frame of a bike belonging to Belgian under-23 rider Femke van Den Driessche at the cyclo-cross world championships last year.
> Mechanical doping: “I won’t trust any victories of the Tour de France,” says Greg LeMond
Since then., however, no hidden motor has been found at a professional race.
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The 3:30 footage does look amazing, but on second inspection his cadence is at least 1.5 that of the group he is breaking away from and he is on a gentle down slope. Look again at his feet. We've seen this quick sprint and shift into TT mode many times from FC.
But hey, people love a consipracy theory...
Just to fan the flames of conspiracy theories, I checked the Cyclingnews live updates (posts) from their website shortly after this motor doping story originally broke. Specifically I checked Paris Roubaix and Tour of Flanders that have been highlighted in this article. Interestingly FC actually changed bikes in both races with about 50-60km to go. I'm sure one report even said they couldn't see what was obviously wrong with his bike. I searched for this as carrying around 2kgs of additional weight (weight of the Vivax system) for the previous 200km would be a disadvantage (the battery only lasts around 30 - 45 mins) .
But the Vivax system at the time was the noisier version. Also, the motor can only be installed in a metal tube and battery was external (saddle bag) along with the switch. Whilst I believe, technically, it would have been possible to customise a one-off solution to conceal all this and do some serious hacking to get it in a carbon frame, that would have taken real skill and sourcing of unusual parts. I don't see how this could all be kept quiet as it would have involved suppliers and skilled mechanics. That seems too difficult to keep a lid on to me.
Notwithstanding, FC produced amazing performances consistently throughout his career. So I'm tending not to believe this conspiracy theory.
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