Tour de France, it will be a tough fight against technological fraud: check who often changes bikes

No more suspicious bike changes. To the Tour de France the turning point: it will be a tough fight against technological fraud. The UCI has unveiled its program, focused on Tablet And X-ray.

Checks before and after the stage

Before each of the 21 stages, a UCI commissioner will be present in the team bus area to check all the bikes used at the start of that day’s stage through the classic tablets. After the stage the main news. At the end of each fraction, checks will be carried out on the winner’s bike, on those of the leaders of the four classifications, on three or four riders drawn and above all on the riders who give rise to suspicions, for example following the pre-stage scan or for a high number of bike changes (in which case the bikes on the flagship can also be checked) or other particular facts detected by the UCI Video Commissioner.

934 checks at the 2022 Tour, all regular

Post-stage checks will be carried out using the mobile x-ray technology or devices that use backscattering and electromagnetic wave transmission technologies. After the riders have crossed the finish line, bikes undergoing post-stage checks will be quickly tagged, allowing quick check procedures to be carried out in minutes. The introduction of RFID tagging (tamper-evident tags using radio frequency identification technology) for all bicycles as part of the UCI’s road equipment registration process for the Tour de France strengthens the ability to monitor the use of bicycles during the stages. A total of 934 bicycle checks were carried out at last year’s Tour de France and no cases of technological fraud were detected.