On a cool afternoon in mid-July I was one of them. I hadn’t ridden much all season, yet something primordial kicked in when I spied another biker just ahead. His calf muscles were swollen like Salamanca hams, and he was stooped over the bars, sweat dripping onto the pavement.

Easy pickings, I thought, as I tore after him. Within moments I’d reeled him in. He, gasping; me, hardly out of breath: I felt, well, guilty. “You’re cheating!” he panted in German as I sped by. “You’ll be out of power soon!”

He was right: I was cheating. With the mash of a button on my handlebars, a 250-watt electric motor had spun to life and increased the power of my pedal strokes by 150 percent. Suddenly I had my own domestique, a 26-volt brute that seemed to grab the saddle and shove me onward every time I pedaled. In a few minutes, I had reached the summit, taken a short walk and realized that cycling big Alpine passes with some breath to spare might not be such a bad way to cheat.

Source: New York Times