You seem very certain. Any links for further reading?
The year after the Festina doping scandal of the late 1990s the Tour de France, won by Lance Armstrong, was the fastest ever.
Yes, the bikes were getting better. Yes, nutrition and training were both getting better.
But they didn't get that much better in only 12 months, and so one might have expected - with the elimination of doping - that the race would have slowed somewhat.
But it didn't, because probably just about everyone - and especially the winner - were all on drugs.
Here's a list covering the period up to and include 2019 of confirmed cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_doping_cases_in_cyclin...
There is a more than strong suspicion that the majority of dopers have never been caught and that, in some cases (including Mr Armstrong), governing bodies and authorities may have covered for and protected them. Every now and then somebody is fed to the wolves so it looks like effective action is being taken.
As a recreational activity cycling is fantastic. As a sport it's a complete joke.
e.g. It's common to see the entire peloton sit up and collectively agree to 'take it easy' for most of a stage to reserve energy for a sprint finish in the last 3 minutes. So the total race time is strongly affected by the mix of team strategies.
It's also very much not a standard race year-to-year, with differing numbers of mountain stages versus flat stages, so the year-to-year times are completely incomparable.
There may still be doping the sport of cycling, but the TdF total race times would be very weak evidence for it.
Actually, the jump in TdF average speed (not total race time) during the early 1990s is fairly often attributed to EPO (and other drug) usage. The average speed in earlier events was lower because of the inconsistency - cyclists would ride much slower on days before (or after) a big stage, and this would drop the average speed for the entire race.
EPO and other drugs improved recovery so cyclists would ride hard everyday.
It's hard to know how true this is - it also corresponded to increased TV coverage for full stages, and more money in the sport. But the average speed jump after 1989 is significant.
In this world, the dunces and losers are those who rely on their clean physiques. Voet cites the case of Charly Mottet, a top French rider of the eighties and nineties, who came to the RMO team, where amazement was expressed that “the bloke was clean.” Mottet had, in many people’s view, the talent to win the Tour, but Voet recognized that he lacked “the wherewithal to make it happen.” In other words, he refused the tempting pharmacopoeia. Mottet was known for his weakness over the final third of the Tour, and the soigneur’s conclusion is as sad as it is hypocritical: “Yes indeed, Charly never had the career that he deserved.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/08/21/the-hardest-te...
It ends up inevitably being about Lance Armstrong. This was 10 years before he owned up to doping.
When I did more weightlifting me and some other guys got stuck at around 75 kg and couldn't put on more weight no matter how hard we trained. A few months later two guys jumped to 90 kg in a very short time. I asked what's going on and they told me they got some stuff from Poland. I assume either steroids or HGH.
PEDs are way too effective for somebody to be able to compete against people who take them. It's simply not possible.
In the 100m a lot of top 10 guys got caught or evaded tests in the last years. There is no way that Bolt is beating them without taking something.
Many peds (ie testosterone) are just extra dosage of something your body produces anyways, or cause your body to increase it's rate of some metabolic process. There is a lot of variance across people anyways: perhaps Bolt just produces an exceptionally high amount of testosterone naturally. In your example, it's not that it is impossible for people without supplemental test to compete with people that have it, it's that it's impossible for someone with dramatically lower test to compete with people that have it, regardless of whether they got it naturally or by supplementation.
I would think that for sports to be as fair as possible, the real answer would be not to forbid people from supplementing, but instead to pick some acceptable level of beneficial metabolic processes and let everyone get themselves to that.
Obviously that's a bit of a crazy idea and is not likely to happen, though.
that's basically how a lot of doping testing works. They don't know where the testerone comes from but assume that people will be within a certain range. In cycling they called Bjarne Riis "Mr 50%" because his hematocrite level was always exactly at the maximum allowed level.
Read Tyler Hamilton's book. It's a good read and gives a lot of insight into how doping works.
That’s what top sports is. It’s people who won the genetic lottery and then also worked hard.
I was the strongest man in one of the Bay Area gyms for a while, all natural, but essentially that was the focus of my day for several years while I worked at home (next door to the gym) and I had 10 hours of sleep nitely.
I went to a natural bobybulding conference once and all the pros were staring at me - I was huge. So it can be done while you're young, but under perfect conditions and until you get injured.
Just curious: How big were you? Did other people in your gym take stuff?
It's a really good book. I read it as somebody with no interest in cycling and the world it painted was fascinating.
> This last point is contentious but make no mistake: PEDs are ahead of detection capabilities. I think that at this point any elite athlete _not_ on PEDs is doomed to fall behind.
If you’re looking for links out of curiosity, below is a quote from an article where athletes were stripped of medals in 2016 for 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games.
“The IOC, which stores samples for 10 years, reanalyzed more than 1,000 samples from the 2008 Beijing Games and 2012 London Olympics with improved techniques that can detect the use of steroids going back weeks and months, rather than days.” [0]
Wikipedia has an entry [1] on stripped Olympic medals with references to the announcements.
If you’re looking to refute that statement, I can offer up an anecdote in support of the statement from a panel discussion with the former head of WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) I attended during the 2010 Winter Olympics [2].
Playing baseball in my youth we had coaches who played division 1 college baseball. The phrase we were told between the ages of 14-16 was, “if you’re not cheating, you’re not competing”. That’s the college baseball wisdom that was brought back to Canada. It’s not hard for me to imagine how that can move on to taking PEDs.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/sports/olympics/olympic-medals-stripped-d...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stripped_Olympic_med...
[2] https://chancentre.com/events/sport-society-sport-ethics-tec...
That said, they disqualified about 10% of the athletes they tested. While significant, and while I'm sure that only catches a portion of offenders, it's not as high as others make it seem.