If you have not seen this video you should drop everything and watch it. It is the most astonishing ebike news I have ever seen in main stream press, and it has huge ramifications. It turns out we are in the same gang all along. Geeky out-of-shape ebike riders and ultra cool pro athlete top-shelf riders on their aerodynamic “king of cool” carbon fiber machines…we were all in the same peloton….holding hands, exchanging glances, just like that movie “Breaking Away” But this time no bicycle pump in the wheel. Now we can all ride together and coexist together. Say no drugs, and say yes to motors!
Among professional cyclists, E-bike and Electric Bike riders are the scorn of the bike paths. We get called cheaters and hollered at by Lycra-wearing dynamos on their high-tech carbon bikes that look kind of like cool electric bikes to us. I mean, to be honest…they look pretty cool and we usually look pretty geeky on our ebikes which usually don’t look that sexy and lean.
Ironically, it is top-shelf professional cyclists that are being called cheaters now on Sunday evening late night TV. Haaa! And those high tech carbon bikes they have been riding, that look like high tech machines? they might be more mechanized than we ever thought. Along with their electronic shift systems and crazy electric computers attached via bluetooth to their phones, they have a hidden motor vibrating just under the seat post.
Yup, those cool looking Lycra bikes we see in races…many of them may have been E-bikes the entire time. And…not as powerful as our ebikes. They have been cheating…and cheating on lamely powered ebikes. Not only that, but the biggest name in all of cycling, Lance Armstrong, has been accused of being one of us…an E-biker.
Lance is always welcome in our group of fast E-bike riders, riding clean looking machines. This is one form of cheating we at electricbike.com we do not mind. If indeed Lance did have an E-bike and won 7 Tour de France’s…Well, damn that is too cool…way cooler than refrigerating blood platelets and doing blood transfusions in between race rounds with your cycle buddies. It turns out the cool way to cheat is to stay clean….and just put a little mini R/C motor in your seat tube.
Professional Bicycle racing is a competitive sport where athletes taking dope to gain an advantage has become common place. We are sick of hearing about the drug taking cyclists. We get it, All kind of drugs are needed to compete at the highest levels at such an excruciating sport as cycling. If you don’t cheat, it’s doubtful you will win at the highest levels its starting to become clear.
We are starting to get it. Professional road bike racing has become more about how clever you cheat. Cyclists on Lithium power? Now that’s clever. Some E-bike builder getting paid 2 million dollars to build a couple E-bikes for one of the top cyclists? Providing entire teams of E-bikes for $25K a pop. Building a 1998 Trek Ebike for 60 minutes and charging CBS $12,000 for parts and labor for basically a Vivax Assist.
Hey now….We got secret boutique E-bike builders making millions of dollars building bikes out of his garage. Who would have ever thought? E-bike millionaires, that’s who. But who knows how many though? E-bike riding Rockstar cyclists winning some of cycling’s top races.
Now in 2016 it is finally out, that it has been happening for the last 20 years and just now in the last year…the judges are starting to test for motors in the bike using FLIR cameras and magnetic sensors. Wowsers. Holy E-bikes.
Without definitive FLIR testing they would have never known…Amazing right? E-Bikes have gotten that good. You can fit a tiny battery and a tiny motor into a little bicycle frame and nobody can tell even with millions watching on TV with judges and spectators all around.
Imagine that. Super stealthy and fast! That means you can ride an E-bike just about anywhere and appear like a regular cyclist regardless of what your local laws say about a motorized bike. That is a secret many of us E-bike builders have had for a long time. The cat is out of the bag. (check out this ebike builders discreet mountain bikes)
Damn 60 minutes…AND…cops are a long ways away from carrying watt meters or FLIR cameras in their belts. One of the only way this kind of cheating was even suspected was last year a racer was hit with a FLIR camera posing as a video camera during a race in Italy. After this it was like opening the floodgates…and at almost every race, judges showed up with heat sensing cameras, and then?…little vibrating easter eggs hidden in the seat tubes were found. Here is a link to a video from France showing moving images of race bicycle heat images.
One of the golden stories of cycling was American Lance Armstrong’s fall from grace. Lance Armstrong was one of the most successful cyclists in the sports history winning an amazing 7 consecutive Tour de France’s (basically the world championship of road bike racing). To this day, Lance is the largest name in professional cycling. He is the person that made professional bicycle racing main-stream in the USA. What makes Lance Armstrong’s story even more spectacular is he is a cancer survivor (and he dated Sheryl Crow).
Later he would have those 7 Tour de France titles stripped after blood tests revealed doping, years after the fact. Amazingly, Armstrong confessed and conceded his championships. But what doesn’t make sense is winning even two Tour de France’s in a row is amazing…winning 7 however, is like impossible. It is known that many of the top cyclists are doping…to win 7 Tour de France’s in a company of fellow dopers still sounds ridiculously impossible.
But with electric motors and secret batteries, it becomes easy. I believe that Lance became one of us….and suddenly got consumed with the great joy it feels to “clown pedal” past Lycra-wearing super jocks, as if they are orange cones standing still. I can imagine him now weaving in and out of the Peloton giggling feverishly. So long, suckers!
So could it be? Is it really true that one of the biggest names in cycling and the biggest names in cheaters is also an E-bike rider? Please tell us it’s true!
This 60 Minutes video did almost everything but directly accuse Armstrong of blasting through the Tour de France with an E-bike. They show bank account statements of this Czech E-bike builder receiving 2 million dollars from an unnamed E-bike racer in 1998, and in 1999 is when Armstrong won his first Tour de France. They also paid this glorified ebike builder $12,000 to recreate a 1999 Trek E-bike like Lance Armstrong would have rode if he rode an E-bike, so they could test it on-camera.
Lance Armstrong is still my hero…And I personally believe he should be given his 7 Tour de France victories back. If you can build an E-bike back in 1998 so good as to fool the entire world on national TV, and crush the souls of chemical doping Lycra riders….We at Electricbike.com salute you. Here is the latest Lance Edition Trek…would pretty freaking fantastic if you can just make it electric, and in honesty you can…for a heavy price.
To see how you too can juice your bike so that you can ride with all your friends, and then flat out embarrass them. It is an easy recipe. A Vivax kit which you can check out here, has a battery pack small enough to fit in a small bag behind your seat. For fooling your buddies. This is enough.
You can hold a 7-Ah / 52V battery (350 watt hour) of 18650 cells in a little seat bag. Of course a seat bag is not going to hold up at a cycle race…we suspect they are hiding their lithium packs in their seat tubes or even in their lycra trousers. Is that a battery in your pants, or are you just glad to see us?
To turn on the throttle, you hide this little red button somewhere but use some paint to disguise the color. The motor slides down your seat tube and powers your bottom bracket quietly, and unnoticed from its hidden location.
The Vivax drive system is reasonably affordable (under $2K) so no need to spend the $2 million that one professional cyclist did. Some cyclists were able to score a built professional bike for as low as $20,000 a bike. Imagine you can build a carbon fiber E-bike monster that you can whoop all your cycling buddies on for less than $10,000. Pretty amazing and a big reason why you should subcribe to this blog. (we understand the $2-million was not for the motors or the installation, it was so he’d keep his mouth shut for ten years)
Join our community, Fast Electric Bike on Facebook or our forum on ElectricBike.com to get more info on how to do it. So you don’t have to pay some E-bike building millionaire big bucks to build for you. Affordable doped carbon fiber road bike for the masses! Yes yes yes!!! E-bikes = way better alternative to drugs. And let’s face it…most of us need a boost to get up that hill, and still keep that smile on our face.
I wrote this article after a 90-minute long phone conversation with Karl from www.electricbike-blog.com where we both got so excited about doping that we decided to have a competition to see who could write and article about it faster. Karl published his a few hours earlier, but I believe he was double-dosing expresso shots!…but I still think that his is the better article. Go and read his and decide for yourself. Competition is good when it brings out the best in people. I think competition is bad when you’re stabbing the people you’re competing against in the back with an ebike. Go Lance.
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Written by Eric, January 2017
