They claim in the UCI statement that ‘The heat patterns shown on a recent documentary which deployed thermal imaging at a bike race are consistent with normal heat from moving parts’. I’ve skimmed the 20 min documentary, and to be fair, the only thermal image they show of pro races are nowhere near as clearcut as the thermal image of the ‘bottom of the downtube, driving the BB’ shot that they ran their ‘calibration’ tests on. That’s also the shot seen in nearly all the articles, but it’s not a pro nor in a race…
I think someone would have to show that you can get similar looking images from an electric motor system using their thermal equipment before you could start accusing riders. And also definitively rule out the patterns they see of ‘about as warm as a tyre’ BBs and rear hubs. The motors they are hypothesising, other than the rim magnet one, are all theoretical designs, most of which would definitely need high level engineering integration in to the bike so would have to be known about by the team (i.e. hidden batteries in chain stays (though these are now pencil thin on most road carbon frames), connectors hidden inside dropouts (so wheels couldn’t be swapped without spotting them) etc.
It also looks really, really hard to image a peloton coming though! And as noted, unless it’s on you don’t see anything – and it might only be used for 10 minutes of a 4-8 hour race/stage, just at that vital breakaway/sharp hill/ecisive point. I can see that logistically, to get images of nearly every bike in the race while moving is going to be much more difficult than scanning them all before and/or after…
For me, the UCI actually is mostly doing the sensible thing with their scanners, especially if they have tested the thermal cams themselves. I’m not sure heat shielding is any easier to add than electromagnetic shielding, so I’d say they should be doing some random, unannounced/hidden thermal cams at a few obvious difficult/break points of a race, when a field has split and it’s easier to image most or all of the group likely to include the winner. Then anything suspicious can be further checked with their scanners and/or stripped down.
So – I’d want more systematic and scientific testing of the thermal cams be it from UCI, the documentary dudes or someone else, and then it could maybe be used to complement the scanner testing they are clearly starting to do in large numbers (not yet every bike of every team, but 200-300 bikes per race which is quite impressive). Maybe more money and a more formal system for that would cover every bike, with a ‘checked’ tag/mark before it can go on a car roof for swapping down the road would help that, but I think they are on the right track generally…
