Right now, somebody is riding a bike frame that could snap when they're like 10 kilometers down the road. And somebody else just swallowed a supplement that's laced with a substance that will get you banned from any bike race on the planet. And there's somebody out there in a city center with a bike that's worth more than a used car which has been stolen from them right now, stripped and sold overseas before the owner even notices that it's gone.
How is everybody today? I went down the absolute rabbit hole. This week, I started looking into one dodgy Alibaba listing and about six hours later, I'm reading FBI case files about international bike theft rings.
Genuinely, you couldn't make up how deep down the rabbit hole I went this week. Today, I want to cover three corners of cycling's underground economy. First, the world of counterfeit carbon frames, where your dream bike might literally turn into a debt trap.
Secondly, the supplement industry's dirty little secret that could end up ruining your entire racing career without you ever knowing it and your reputation with that. And finally, the organized crime network stealing thousands of bikes and shipping them across borders. Quick thing before we get into this, this one took ages to research.
So, if you do find it interesting, please take a second and hammer that subscribe button. I'm dealing with all three of these topics cuz they are massively linked and you'll see it coming together into this dirty underbelly if you stick until the end. Okay, so imagine this.
You're browsing online dreaming about your next bike and you come across a carbon frame that looks identical to a top- end bike. Say a Pinerella Dogma. Same shape, geometry looks good, paint job looks good, everything looks perfect, except it's not a seven and a half or eight grand frame set.
It's like€,000 euro or 900 quid or maybe even cheaper shipped directly to your door. And you think, all right, maybe this is just the factory selling direct. Maybe they're cutting out the middleman.
Maybe I've just found the greatest deal in cycling history. Like, you absolutely haven't. Here's what's going on.
If it sounds too good to be true, trust me, it is too good to be true. There are factories across China, and we're not talking about back alley operations. These are proper manufacturing facilities and they're pumping out counterfeit frames as their main business for every major brand that you can think of.
Specialized, Pinterelloo, Trex, CurveL, Cannondale. If it's expensive, trust me, somebody over there is faking it. And the scary part isn't that they look fake.
The scary part is that they look real. Like, I've had these in my hand. They're almost indistinguishable from the real thing.
Like, very, very real. The logos are just right. The paint is close to perfect.
The geometry looks correct to anyone maybe that's worked in the factory, but to you or me, the geometry looks perfect. But here's where it gets properly dangerous. Because I went down and I looked at the independent lab testing and what that showed about counterfeit frames and about 11% less stiffness is what we're told they are than the genuine article, which okay, that doesn't sound like much.
And you may be thinking, okay, it's a slight performance deficit. But no, that's not what we're talking about at all. We're talking about the tensil strength, the amount of force before the frame actually fails and snaps in half.
That's dramatically lower. The epoxy, that's like the glue. It's not mixed properly in a lot of cases.
And the carbon layup is super inconsistent if viewed by an expert carbon maker. Essentially, there's no quality control because, well, why would there be? In December 2025, literally just a few months ago, Specialized on AliExpress worked with Chinese law enforcement on what turned out to be one of the biggest counterfeit busts in cycling history.
They raided two facilities they seized $1.6 million worth of fake goods. Fake Tarmac SL8 frames, fake Roval handlebars and wheels, seat posts, forks, the lot.
plus 9 and a half thousand sticker sets just sitting there ready to turn the next anonymous carbon tube frame into a quote unquote specialized bike. Seven people were arrested as a part of this sting operation. But that's just one operation in one city.
Imagine how many are still running. Now, I do want to be fair here. Not every Chinese carbon frame is a counterfeit debt trap.
There are legitimate manufacturers out there. Windspace is getting great reviews in the last few years. They're making solid frames at lower prices and they're selling direct.
Some even have UCI approval. The difference is they're selling under their own brand, not pretending to be Pinerella. The rule of thumb is like anything, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.
If it looks like a dogma, if it claims to be a dogma, but it costs like a few hundred euro, it's probably not a bargain. It's more of a gamble. And the stakes on this one, they're your collar bone or they're worse.
Right, so that's fake frames. But next one might actually be a lot scarier because at least with the fake dodgy frame, you get a feeling that there's something wrong. You know, you get the 400 euro pinella, you're kind of like, ah, the spidey sense is tingling.
But what about something you swallow? Okay, quick question for you. How confident are you on like a scale of 1 to 10 that the supplements you're actually taking contain what the label says?
I'm guessing you're saying a seven or an eight. But I actually think after going through all this research, I've dropped to probably about a four. And that's pretty alarming.
Depending on what which study you look at, somewhere between 15 and 18% of dietary supplements contain things that aren't listed on the label at all. Let me say that again. 15 to 18%.
That's pretty high. And we're not talking about like a little bit of extra vitamin C here. We're talking about banned substances, stuff that can totally ruin your reputation.
anabolic steroids, SM, which are like selective androgen receptor modules, essentially muscle bodybuilding drugs, stimulants, heavy metals. The Clean Label Project tested a bunch of protein powders in 2017 and found that half, like 50% contained unsafe levels of heavy metal contaminants. And the reason this happens is wild because unlike actual medicines, supplements don't need to be approved before they're sold.
The FDA doesn't go and check what's in them. There's no one standing in the factory going, "Hang on, let me verify what's actually going into this and to make sure it lines up with what you say is going into this." It's basically an honor system.
And when the honor system meets a billion dollar profit motivation, yeah, they're essentially not dotting all the eyes and crossing all the tees. What's happening is crosscontamination. Products are getting made on one surface, the surface isn't getting fully cleaned, and the next product is coming along and getting made there.
So, we're having these mixed use surfaces. Now, here's where this gets really relevant to us as cyclists. Because if you're racing, even on an amateur level, by holding a license, you agree to abide by UCI's anti-doping guidelines.
You're just subject to these anti-doping rules. And if a contaminated supplement puts a banned substance in your system, that's your problem, not the supplement company's problem, your problem. Because there's a thing in doping called strict liability.
And it means it doesn't matter how the substance got into your body. If it's there, you're guilty. No matter what, no matter how it got there, it's your responsibility.
So, picture this. You buy a recovery drink off Amazon. You take it every day.
Six weeks later, you get tested at the local criterium and you get popped for something you've never even heard of before. Like a word that probably has like 20 letters in it. Your racing license gone.
Your reputation absolutely trashed. All because some factory in god knows where crosscontaminated their production line. Now, the good news.
There's always ways to protect yourself against this. Third-party certification programs like Informed Sport, NSF, Certified for Sport, and the Cologne List actually test batches of supplements independently. This isn't a perfect system.
It's not a perfect guarantee, but it massively reduces your risk. Basically, if you're racing or you just care about what you're putting into your body, only buy stuff with one of these logos on it. And if it doesn't have one, honestly, I think twice about it.
I really started going through my supplements and just throwing the bin ones that I'm not sure about. Since getting back into training, the biggest thing that's hit me isn't fitness, it's fueling. I used to finish rides totally wrecked.
I'd come through the door, collapse on the couch, scroll through Instagram, and call it recovery. But now that I'm actually fueling properly, and that's anywhere from 80 to 120 grams of carbs an hour, depending on the session, it's a completely different story. I'm coming home from training feeling fresh and my power data throughout the ride supports this.
I can actually function when I get off the bike. It's honestly blown me away how big a difference that proper fueling makes. When I start a fuel and right, I realize just how good I could actually feel on the bike.
A daily staple in my training now. It's for endurance because I know exactly what I'm putting into my body. Every product is designed for performance.
It's tested in real racing and it's used by the very best from Olympians to tour to France riders. It's the same science just without the luxury brand markup. Seriously, jump over to their site and check out the prices.
You'll be absolutely blown away. It's real fuel, unbeatable price, great taste, no gut issues. Like, that's a winning combo for me.
For Endurance, built on science, proven in sweat. Check them out at forendurance.com and start fueling smarter.
I'm going to put the link in the description down below. Okay, here's where this legality in cycling starts to get really wild because I think most of us intuitively know that bike theft is a problem. Someone in their club has had a bike nicked.
Someone in your friend circle has had a bike nicked. Maybe you have. But I definitely didn't realize and I'm sure you didn't realize the scale of what's actually going on in the US alone.
Over 2.4 4 million bikes are stolen every year. $2.
4 million. That's worth about $1.4 billion annually.
Bikes are two and a half times more likely to be stolen than a car. And the recovery rate, brace yourself, it's less than 6%. If your bike gets nicked, there's roughly a 94% chance you're never seeing that bike again.
But here's the bit that fascinated me. Where do they actually all go? Because it's not just some bloke selling your CEL at a car boot sale.
There's actual organized operations running this. The FBI Yeah, the actual FBI investigated a ring operating out of San Francisco Bay Area that was systematically stealing high-end racing bikes and reselling them in Mexico through Facebook Marketplace and Instagram. And in Colorado, the attorney general charged eight men in connection with 29 bike shop burglaries.
They were just hitting the shop. They clean it out and then they shipped the inventory across the border. And Facebook just kept coming up again and again in my research Facebook Marketplace.
About 27% of recovered stolen bikes were originally listed for sale on Facebook Marketplace. But when the investigators, like the people actually gathering the evidence in the case numbers, when they tried to get people from Facebook to help, according to the reports, it was like talking to a brick wall. No cooperation, no action, just nothing.
And ebikes, we all know, have exploded in the last few years. is they've made matters way worse because, you know, knackers love rubbing shiny stuff. They're like magpies.
They're attracted to the shiny stuff. Ebikes now make up about a quarter of all bike thefts because they're high value and they're easy to resell. A stolen ebike is basically like cash on wheels.
So, what can you actually do? The data says there's a couple of things you can do that actually work. Bikes with some kind of ID marking like bike register sticker or similar have a recovery rate of about 23% versus 8% without it.
It's still not great, but it's nearly three times better. And bikes with a registered serial number are 65% more likely to be recovered. So, a minimum, as an action point, write down your serial number, photograph your bike, register it somewhere, and get a proper lock for it.
Not one of those crappy little cable locks, like a proper Dlock and a chain. Cuz the data is pretty clear here. If somebody wants your bike badly enough, they're going to get that bike.
But most bike thieves are opportunistic. And if you make it slightly harder for them, if you slow them down, they'll generally move on to the next one to someone that's not going to slow them down as much. So, think about it as just introducing friction.
I think the takeaway here isn't to be paranoid, but it is to be informed. Check where your frames actually come from. Look for third-party certification on your supplements.
Register your bike and lock it properly. None of this is complicated, but it does require knowing that this stuff exists in the first place. If this podcast opened your eyes to something you didn't know about, please do let me know in the comments which section surprised you the most.
I've got a feeling the supplement one is going to catch a lot of people offguard. We've seen some high-profile positive crosscontamination cases through the years, some even close to home here. If you do want to see me actually order one of these Alibaba frames and put it through the paces or even maybe put it through a wall or something, let me know that too in the comments.
That could be an interesting follow-up. Cheers for watching. Subscribe if you haven't and I'll see you in the next one.
Excuse the brief interruption to my conversation with Sam Imp. Since this video has been recorded, I've actually lost the weight. I've gone from 88 to 80 kg.
I can't actually believe it because the crazy thing is I'm eating way more than ever before. Some days my jaw is actually getting sore. I'm eating so much.
But I feel amazing on the bike. My power numbers are not quite back to my best, but I'm trending there very fast. But importantly for me, my big hesitation when I got back training was, yes, I had the time available to train, but I couldn't do it if it meant sacrificing energy, the focus to come and have highlevel conversations on the podcast.
And I have so much energy off the bike. Like, I'm coming in the door fresh after three-hour rides. It's wild.
I've never experienced it before. And I want you guys to check this out. I chatted with Sam Offair and his co-founder David at Hexus and they've hooked up an amazing discount code for the Roadman listeners.
So if you want to try Hexus for yourself, it's honestly the biggest leap that I've seen in cycling ever. Forget aerodynamics, it's fueling properly. So if you go over to Hexus Hexis.
live and you use the code roadman when you're checking out, you're going to get 25% off your Hexus plan. Go just test it out. Trust me, it's a gamecher.