<story><title>How Olympics officials try to catch “motor doping”</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/motor-doping-cycling</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dmckeon</author><text>&amp;gt; promoting bike brands and riding bikes provided by their sponsors&lt;p&gt;Therein lies an answer - change the disincentives - instead of banning cheating riders, ban all of the sponsors of those riders for a time.  Now the onus is on the sponsors to discourage cheating.</text></item><item><author>notatoad</author><text>The olympics don&amp;#x27;t really set the protocol for any of this.  the rules and procedures for each sport are set by their respective international sport organization.  for cycling that&amp;#x27;s the UCI.&lt;p&gt;the olympics is only one event, and only happens once every four years.  the rest of the season, that happens every year, is much more important and doesn&amp;#x27;t have an olympic host to provide bikes.  so there needs to be some procedure that catches motor doping at all the races, not just one infrequent race.  The olympics is just going to follow the same procedures that are used for all the rest of the worldtour level races.  and while the olympics might not care about keeping the rider&amp;#x27;s bike sponsors happy, the rest of the races do.&lt;p&gt;if riders weren&amp;#x27;t out there promoting bike brands and riding bikes provided by their sponsors, pro bike racing wouldn&amp;#x27;t be a thing.</text></item><item><author>etimberg</author><text>Why not just have the Olympic host supply the same bike model to every participant rather than having each rider bring their own bike?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scosman</author><text>The sponsors aren&amp;#x27;t partners who are tuning up the bikes. It&amp;#x27;s companies who cut a cheque and expect logos everywhere.&lt;p&gt;Individual riders&amp;#x2F;teams are motivated to win and get sponsor dollars, so may resort to cheating. They know they will lose sponsors forever and be banned if caught, so they try to hide it from sponsors and officials. Basically: the same disincentives exist today. They just need to catch folks. It&amp;#x27;s just doping v2.</text></comment>
<story><title>How Olympics officials try to catch “motor doping”</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/motor-doping-cycling</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dmckeon</author><text>&amp;gt; promoting bike brands and riding bikes provided by their sponsors&lt;p&gt;Therein lies an answer - change the disincentives - instead of banning cheating riders, ban all of the sponsors of those riders for a time.  Now the onus is on the sponsors to discourage cheating.</text></item><item><author>notatoad</author><text>The olympics don&amp;#x27;t really set the protocol for any of this.  the rules and procedures for each sport are set by their respective international sport organization.  for cycling that&amp;#x27;s the UCI.&lt;p&gt;the olympics is only one event, and only happens once every four years.  the rest of the season, that happens every year, is much more important and doesn&amp;#x27;t have an olympic host to provide bikes.  so there needs to be some procedure that catches motor doping at all the races, not just one infrequent race.  The olympics is just going to follow the same procedures that are used for all the rest of the worldtour level races.  and while the olympics might not care about keeping the rider&amp;#x27;s bike sponsors happy, the rest of the races do.&lt;p&gt;if riders weren&amp;#x27;t out there promoting bike brands and riding bikes provided by their sponsors, pro bike racing wouldn&amp;#x27;t be a thing.</text></item><item><author>etimberg</author><text>Why not just have the Olympic host supply the same bike model to every participant rather than having each rider bring their own bike?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>OtherShrezzing</author><text>Surely this just moves the incentive from the sportsperson&amp;#x2F;team to the sponsor - who have significantly deeper financial resources to undermine WADA&amp;#x27;s testing regimes.&lt;p&gt;WADA&amp;#x27;s budget is something like $50m. The likes of Ineos &amp;amp; Red Bull have sports marketing budgets well into the billions.</text></comment>