Rugby League stars to race Italian Pursuit at Revolution 23

@darnac Richard Virenque and his French Festina colleagues didn't exactly get a free ride in '98.

That said - there are no shortage of delivery riders in my part of Edinburgh riding "clearly illegal" machines (because throttle being used at speed so almost certainly not EAPCs). OTOH I'm slow and they're not all blowing by me; so in practice perhaps less drama? I think the problems tend to be limited by "most delivery riders don't make much money". Indeed I believe the most common scheme is for several people to *hire* a bike together and then ride the heck out of it in shifts. The really high-power ebikes are (currently) more pricey. So ... i guess it's harm minimisation by capitalism? (Not that the sellers care even enough to eg. pass on "you can't use this on the road mate"). The real "looks like a motorbike to me" ones seem to be limited to those presumably on more profitable errands than delivering groceries. Or scrotty yoof - I'm guessing of the local "dodgy families". But maybe that changes around eg. Chelsea or Sloane and it's a plague of racing rahs?

If anyone wants to do something to help, the Cyclists' Defence Fund is appealing for donations. Can't post a link without ending up in comment purgatory, but easy enough to find if you just google (well, easy enough to find how to donate to the CDF; the specific appeal related to this case is a bit harder to find, but "cdf appeal e-bike" seems to work for me. If you go through the appeal page, you get a free mug featuring Dave Walker's drawings).

@jackcycles 1. No evidence that the rider was a delivery driver or carrying a "silly blue delivery bag"; 2. There is no legal requirement for bicycle delivery riders to have insurance any more than any other cyclist; 3. People who want illegally fast ebikes don't rent £6K Terns, which are difficult and expensive to hack to exceed 25 km/h, when they can get a cheap bike and conversion kit for about £400 that will do silly fast speeds. 4. Re bike shop owner dragged down the street by an ebike, I'll take things that never happened for $500; 5. Are you Nigel?

I don't think jackcycles has provided any evidence that the bike shop owner dragged onto the pavement didn't then continue down the footway on the wrong side of the road way over the speed limit through a red light two-abreast and run over poor wheelywheely in his wheelchair again.

@tomlew Where is the evidence for /your/ claim that existing EPO tests can reliably detect doping at far below minimum effective doses (you didn't say "reliably", but that seems a sensible qualifier - without that, you do not have an effective test)? WADA actually funded research into developing tests for microdosing of EPO. I don't know the background as to why, but I have to assume they did so because of problems with the prior tests in detecting microdosing. E.g., I think this paper is reporting on at least some such research (some of the work cited is simply the prior work of various subsets of the authors): Wang, G., Durussel, J., Shurlock, J. et al. "Validation of whole-blood transcriptome signature during microdose recombinant human erythropoietin (rHuEpo) administration." BMC Genomics 18 (Suppl 8), 817 (2017). DOI: 10.1186/s12864-017-4191-7 In the background it notes of the direct test for EPO microdosing: " The main limitations of this direct approach are a variable and short detection window and low sensitivity. … Despite these advances, important limitations in detection of the direct approach have prompted a paradigm shift to the indirect identification of the effect of the prohibited method and/or substance. " And on the Athlete Bio-Passport (ABP) approach: "For example, the application of the ABP failed to reveal any evidence of rHuEpo microdosing (i.e. 20–30 IU∙kg−1 body mass rHuEpo twice weekly for 8 weeks) in 10 healthy male subjects [11]. In addition, the haematological parameters of the ABP may be confounded with factors such as altitude exposure, since hypoxia may affect the blood variables and vascular volumes [12, 13]. " And of course, all the top elite athletes (and their domestiques in cycling) are doing regular altitude camps, which - aside from the direct benefits on RBC - has the side-effect of making ABP data basically inadmissible (a useful side-effect IF you're doing blood doping). Despite the ABP not being able to detect micro-dosing, there is a clear effect on at least some blood values in the micro-dosing data (MDS). See Figure 3 and read the section "Haemotological analysis" on the MDS. So... TTBOMK: 1. micro-dosing definitely has an impact on blood values - you can see it in the data there, and I definitely felt it (I was one of the subjects in the MDS). 2. Neither direct tests nor ABP can reliably detect EPO microdosing, according to that paper - and WADA believes it too, because they funded at least some portions of the work described in that paper (they funded at least the MDS portion). Repost: Replace my direct link to the paper published on Springer with the text of the citation and the DOI (search that and you'll find it), to appease Road.cc's overzealous filtering.

@Paul J That might be asking a bit much, given that links to road.cc's own site are falling into the black hole.

@tomlew Sigh. I typed out a long reply to you, including a link to a very relevant paper (which itself references a number of other relevant studies), and it's got lost in Road.cc's blackhole of a moderation queue - cause I linked to a scientific paper. Road.cc - can you please check the mod queue, and can you also please whitelist comments that reference URIs to major scientific publishing platforms? Thanks.

@Surreyrider Well, quite - plus there's the video coverage of the event, which doesn't show him making any obvious mistake, but rather shows the whole train of riders going wide through the corner and him getting cramped for space - not unlike many other crashes where there's no suggestion that lack of sleep was an issue.

@Rendel Harris I think there is a line in there about specific riders having broken anti-doping rules or could so - meaning they essentially have a whole lot more leeway to test.