Originally Posted by
cthenn
I'm not going through 9 pages to see if this was touched on, but what is people's opinion on flagging obvious e-bike KOMs? As in, the KOM is 50+ mph...As in, half the time as known pros, done by some rando. As in 3000+ VAM. As in the guy's profile pic is his freaking motor.
I guess if it were my KOM, I might be upset, but people generally don't seem to care. And can we get all the "Strava isn't real racing, who cares, a Strava KOM means exactly nothing" comments out of the way, and if you don't want to post on the actual subject, feel free to refrain from adding a comment, kthx! I just flagged an activity which was clearly obvious, but I wouldn't flag anything I only suspect is done on e-bike, and of course if there's HR data to back up an effort, I'd never flag that either. But after I flagged this particular ride, I was exploring more segments, and it seems like this is becoming a thing on Strava. I found a few other segments with ridiculous speeds as the KOM, and no one has flagged them, so it seems like most people don't really care. Thoughts?
I don't go hunting for obviously fake segment times, but sometimes they pop out to me. In the past few weeks I've flagged several rides while I was looking at how I did on my own rides, clicked on a segment of interest, and saw that the KOM time was set by someone going 50 mph on a route leaving a popular mountain biking park, where the rest of the guy's ride was obviously done on his mountain bike at conventional speeds. There's no reason not to flag those, and shame on the guys who logged those rides and didn't fix them themselves when they saw KOMs show up on roads they knew they hadn't even ridden on. Just dumbasses forgetting to stop their Garmin before driving home, then can't be bothered to clean up their mess.
I haven't seen any rides that were obviously e-bike. I don't even know what e-bikes there are, or what they're capable of. Plus, given the "mechanical doping" videos I saw on GCN where they showed some hidden e-motors in the seat tube, I'd think if someone actually had one of these it would be incredibly hard if not impossible to prove it on Strava. The guy might show very high heart rates because he's actually riding really hard, but getting that little however many watt boost from the hidden motor. You'd never be able to recognize or prove that, especially if the boost were small enough that he only beat the #2 time by like a mph or two.