Mechanical doping: Forget concealed motors - electromagnetic powered wheels are now the weapon of choice in the motor doper's arsenal. Maybe

When I do the Etape this summer, I will be keeping a close eye on where other riders are placing their hands on the bars and what they are pressing......especially Italian ones.

If this wheel isn't powered, then it's going to cause a fair bit of drag, unless the rotor/stator system move relative to each other.

Just turn over any motor by hand and you can feel the resistance in the motor. When you see the video that sparked all this off, the wheel of Hesjedal's bike just spinning as it freewheeled after he'd fallen off, you can see that if this type of wheel was fitted it would come to a stop pretty quickly.

When the mysterious person says “I alone have sold 1,200 of them in Italy", surely he means the  Vivax Assist type system, not the €200,000 electromagnetic rear wheels.

Beyond this Gazetta article is there evidence the wheel exists?

Is this April 1st or February 1st? I can't believe this for a few reasons.
1) How could this be sold to 1200 people if it is just being revealed now in the press?
2) Another problem I have is the 1200 people that can supposedly afford the 200,000 price.  I would guess there is less than 10 people in the whole world who MIGHT be a customer, much less than 1200 Italian riders. If going fast on a bike is their idea of fun, then why not just get a motorcycle for faster speeds and they can go for much longer at a fraction of 200K.
3) Technical information and details are just not provided.
4) I seriously doubt the system can work continously for the duration of a race of 4-6 hours.  
If not then the extra magnets or whatever in the rim cavity would have a negative impact when not operational.

Utter bo**ocks. Why would cadence be a factor if the wheel forms the rotor of an electric motor? 

As noted above, there needs to be a stator somewhere in the system, effectively a set of electromagnetic poles. Where is this located.....in the chain stays. Also as noted above, air gap is citical for efficiency. How close are the chainstays on the bike with the magic wheel. 

And finally, the cost...€200k. A working system could be cobbled together for a fraction of this. But it would produce bugger all power and would be easily detected. Maybe all that cost is swallowed up in the system for supercooling the electromagnets .

A motor is just a magnet in a moving magnetic field. In this case the wheel is part of the motor, but the problem is the large air gap between rotor and stator (perhaps coils inside the chain stays) which will reduce the efficiency. The same principle as a fork mounted contactless dynamo light. An alternative would be magnets on the crank axle and coils in the seat and downtubes. It would be nearly silent, but may be powerful enough to make a difference. Shouldn't be hard to detect though. Hopefully the UCI will make their findings public.

possible in theory, and might be quiter in operation, but it does sound like a very ineffecient system, and I don't see why this would be any more difficult to police that the 'standard' seat tube motor

I can't imagine the wheels being very efficent . Built couple of ebikes and those damn magnets are not only heavy, but at best only 60-80% efficent. So just by having it on your bike you will lower your time by a lot. I don't think that 20-60w for an hour or two will change anything. Might even worsen it. The previous model which was conseled in the frame was more efficent for it size, weight and most probably used the fram to disapate the heat produced. Not to mention the direct contact with the gears, so there was little to no loss in efficency.

Wait, the source is claming to have sold €240million worth of stock on this? Really? Over how long? a company turning over €240million is a big deal. A really big one.