CHASING THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

Having spent over a year investigating motor doping, Chris Marshall-Bell examines the rumours and unanswered questions that remain

- Chris Marshall-Bell

Motor doping: pro riders enhancing not their own performance but instead adding watts directly to the back wheel – what do you reckon? Are you shrugging your shoulders, or shouting about a hidden conspiracy that cycling continues to wilfully ignore? One year ago, my response was somewhere in between those two extremes. I’d heard rumours, of course, but I had no firm opinion either way. I’d seen the viral videos that many keyboard warriors cite as ‘proof ’ of motor doping – Fabian Cancellara’s 2010 Tour of Flanders win and Chris Froome’s Mont Ventoux attack at the 2013 Tour de France – but I wasn’t convinced. Then something very strange and unexpected happened.

In 2022, I chanced upon a YouTube video that reminded me of the story of Femke Van den Driessche, a Belgian cyclo-cross rider who was caught with a concealed motor inside her spare bike at the 2016 Cyclocross World Championships U23 race. She was the first – and to date only – rider to be sanctioned for motor doping and in April 2016 was handed a six-year ban from the sport. I was overwhelmed by curiosity about how and why the sport had been so quick to forget such a shameless scandal. Surely the threat hadn’t simply vanished.

Over the past 12 months my obsession with motor doping has taken me across Europe, beginning with a trip to Belgium to meet Van den Driessche. She was just 19 when the motor was discovered, and I was determined to find out what motivated her to attempt this bizarre form of cheating. This led me to bigger questions: was Van den Driessche really the only one? Can we be confident that motors haven’t infiltrated the pro peloton to a far greater extent?