19 year old Femke Van Den Driessche has been banned for 6 years from racing and fined $20,569 after being caught with a concealed motor in her bike.
The Belgian cyclocross racer was caught at the 2016 UCI Cyclocross World Championships after a magnetic resonance scan revealed a Vivax motor and battery concealed in the seat-tube according to USA Today. The motor was controlled via a Bluetooth switch hidden under the handlebar tape.
UCI disciplinary tribunal ruled Van Den Driessche be stripped of all titles and return all prize money as a result of the “Mechanical Doping” scandal.
This is the how the Vivax Motor works:
p.s. We do not condone cheating but one has to imagine that in cycling’s long history of gaining competitive edges by less than ethical means, this 19 year old isn’t the only competitor to have used similar devices to “mechanically dope”, but just the first one to get caught.
