What Pros Use

There are innumerable superlatives orbiting the world of sport. It seems players are endlessly crowned with hardest, best, fastest, strongest, etc… in no particular order and sometimes without reason. I’d be a liar to say that WPU is the exception, we beat the drum as loud as our nemesis and unlike them - we mean everything we say. Sport is an appreciation of drama, a respect for the pregnant silence prior to an attack, and a worship of perfect execution.

If there has ever been a sporting event that mirrored the sentiment of perfection it is the cycling time trial:

1. Put a human on a bike
2. Draw the finish line
3. Give the rider a pat
4. Watch the suffering drama

The time trial is simply a race against yourself and the clock. There are no other competitors to draft behind, no smug satisfaction of dropping your competitors, and no one to inspire you to be a better cyclist than the you that showed up. Today we feature a time trial specialist who is so good that they invented a way of cheating just to explain his performances: Fabian Cancellara.

Mechanical Doping

Fabian Cancellara has been accused of mechanical doping. Rest assured that this is not the same accusation lobbed at Alberto Contador, Floyd Landis and Lance Armstrong.  They’re accused of regular doping.

Doping: the use of a substance (as an anabolic steroid or erythropoietin) or technique (as blood doping) to illegally improve athletic performance[1]

"Does this helmet make me look faster?"

The folly that Cancellara has been accused of is attaching a motor to his bicycle[2]. Of course these accusations are silly, when we all know that mechanical doping is actually just another way to say perfection. Put this unholy being in a time trial and a spandex-clad behemoth will emerge.

Fabian has more metal than Fort Knox. He’s has won countless trophies in time trials, classics, stages of the Grand Tours, gold in the Olympics and the WC stripes. Let’s translate this for regular folk: he rides his bike faster than I drive a car. This is Cancellara’s 2012 bike with Team Nissan, Leopard, Trek, Radioshack[3].

1. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doping [↩]
2. a.k.a., riding an e-bike – not sure whether it’s as grave as arriving at the TdF on a recumbent [↩]
3. Can we all agree on the absurdity of this team? [↩]