It seems that the newly-assigned UCI president, Lappartient, has decided to remove once and for all the hot ‘mechanical doping’ topic from the cycling world with some new, tighter controls to be applied at the end of next month.
David Lappartient has promised to do whatever it takes to remove this topic from everyone’s mind. Apparently, now it’s the perfect time to achieve this by taking some drastic, more advanced measures starting from January, next year.
When speaking for the La Gazzeta dello Sport, Lappartient said: “We don’t want technological fraud to continue as a hot topic. An investigation is recently taking place in France. There hasn’t been a lot of trust in the UCI’s strategy, and that generated suspicions. With tighter, more efficient controls we can protect the riders and their image.”
“We’ll announce a new strategy on January 30,” Lappartient told La Gazzetta, earlier this week. “We’re working with the help of [Jean-Christophe] Peraud and Bob Stapleton. I can reveal that the budget has increased. We will use a mix of deterrents: tablet, x-ray, thermal cameras and even dismantling bikes.
“There will be more people involved,” Lappartient said. “And we’ll help the national federations fight the problem, too.”
I would like to thank them for their trust and for supporting my project-plan for the future of cycling.
— David Lappartient (@DLappartient) September 21, 2017
An ineffective table-based method
Currently speaking, UCI uses an advanced tablet device to detect any ‘magnetic flux density’ of motors. However, only a few weeks before the UCI election took place in September, a new report surfaced by France Télévisions. It clearly indicated the apparent ineffectiveness of the UCI’s tablet-based method to discover any case of mechanical doping.
During another interview with Belgian broadcaster RTBF, UCI president Lappartient admitted that improving the current UCI’s measures against one of the most popular doping-related cases – mechanical doping, aka technological fraud, would be one of his main objectives as a new president of the biggest cycling body.
