Insider turns down rumours of motor doping after fastest Giro d'Italia ever: "I don't know how you as a rider would imagine to get away with it with all the checks"

After the fastest Giro d'Italia of all time, we once again hear the accusations of riders using ilegal technology, specifically hidden engines in their bicycles. How much truth is there to those rumours? And is it even possible to sneak an engine to the professional peloton at the era of in-depth checks by race commissaries, equipped with tablets that can see through every lie?

Sporza's spy in the peloton takes a closer look at the topic. But as he keeps reminding reader throughout his post, the likelihood of a mechanical fraud in professional peloton is close to zero. "You would sometimes think that Tadej Pogacar drives a moped, but unfortunately that is not the case. In the peloton there is never really any talk about motorcycles."

"I have seen the crazy story from a French amateur race. A 53-year-old rider fled to his van when the organization wanted to check him on a motorcycle. After which the race director lay on the hood of the van for 100 meters."

"We have not yet seen such Western scenes in the professional peloton. But I do notice that we are being checked a lot for motorcycles this year," he says, noting that sometimes teams kept being checked every day of a race.

"To date, no one in the professional peloton has been caught with a motorcycle. I honestly think that it would be impossible to ride around with a motorcycle in 2024," is his opinion.

"Every so often you have some idiot, like Jérôme Pineau, who says that riders use motors. But I don't know how you as a rider would imagine something like that and how you would get away with it in these times full of checks."

"In the period 2008-2013, stories occasionally emerged about motorcycles in the peloton. I believe that there were actually riders riding around with a motor in their bike. But after the rumors about a motor at Cancellara, the UCI took action to detect mechanical fraud. This does not mean that Cancellara actually used a motor."