> For the prestigious pro events samples are kept for years afterwards and are subject to re-testing at any time as science advances.

That’s easy to solve. Use some of the prize money to stage an elaborate heist of the blood sample and replace it with a clean sample.

I bet this would make a good movie. Could be called “Blood Spoke”.

Of course it happens. At the highest levels and at the amateur levels. People want to win. It's like telling people they shouldn't commit crimes because they might end up in prison or worse. But people continue to commit crimes and end up in prison when they are caught, or worse, when they are killed.

If prostitution is the oldest profession in the world, according to some, cheating is the oldest way to gain an advantage.

I mean, just a few weeks ago, we found out about a guy who was working for I don't know how many companies at the same time, that a start-up had developed some artificial intelligence software to cheat during tech interviews and had secured some good funding. Well, but that can't happen in sport, even though it's been happening since the dawn of time. Sport is business, and business is dirty.

It's not necessarily a new performance-enhancing molecule that nobody has heard of, but alternative posology or training regimen to stay under detection threshold, new masking products, etc.

Doping has been a cat-and-mouse game for decades, it's not unrealistic to think this is still happening.

The fact that Pogacar this year managed to reach Bjarne "Mr. 60%" Riis levels of performance in the mountain makes you wonder if this is only standard athletic and performance science or if they're something else.

I would argue that history suggests this is likely. The dopers have substantially more financial resources than the testers. EPO is a great example. It was widely used in cycling for almost 10 years before tests were developed. It was pretty much a miracle drug from a performance standpoint and undetectable. The very few cyclists that tried to blow the whistle were run out of the sport. Similarly, blood doping was widely used for a decade after the EPO test was developed and no one ratted out the teams doing it until USADA brought the hammer down on Armstrong.

It’s also worth thinking about the incentives to test and catch cheaters. Do the organizers of the Tour de France really want to bust the biggest names in the sport? That would destroy their livelihood. Do the national anti-doping authorities want the athletes from their country busted (look how many national antidopingborgs have successfully appealed adverse rulings through CAS)? It’s in everyone’s best interest to bust a low level doper here and there to make it look like they are watching but to ignore the big names that fans are coming to see. All of this is also why motor doping is unlikely. Motor doping leaves incontrovertible evidence of cheating. Positive drug tests can always be challenged as either inaccurate testing or unintentional contamination.

> and remember: the top performers getting busted would probably mean the end of pro cycling as we know it for decades

You mean, like when Lance Armstrong got caught?

It was less than 20 years ago and yet you still argue like it didn't happen. Undetected doping was indeed possible (he did it for years) and no it didn't destroy pro cycling…

This sounds like the same fud Armstrong conned most people into believing. In his case EPO was so hard to detect he got away with it for how many years?

So imo: it’s possible but more likely than you think.

It's been proved scientifically that microdosing EPO is undetectable and results in a significant performance boost:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36317927/ https://www.usada.org/wp-content/uploads/R058.pdf

Now I cannot say this cannot be proven in the future, but right now it is definitely possible, and not even a secret.

Perhaps there's drugs which mask the actual performance enhancers now. The women's marathon record was broken last year by Ruth Chepngetich by a considerable margin. Seemed too good to be true, and many of the groups I'm in called out doping straight away.

She has just been suspended for 2 years for a drug which I believe (may be wrong) masks other performance enhancing drugs.

I think that you have to actually watch the grand tours to understand why this seems plausible:

Both Pogacar and del Toro (UAE’s gc riders in the Tour and Giro, respectively) are able to keep up with (and even drop) the strongest climbers, and then look fresh as a daisy across the line. Like they aren’t even trying.

This was most obvious when del Toro lost to Yates on the last stage of this year’s Giro, but Pogacar does it too. They start the final climb a few minutes behind the leaders, then match the fastest rider up the climb and then magically have zero fatigue for the final sprint across the line to pick up a few spots. Yates only won because del Toro made a huge tactical mistake of focusing on Carapaz

Everyone else is dying and the riders from this one team look like they could do another stage… and we’re supposed to think that’s natural?

"cycling isn't a huge money maker for financial investors like football, rather it's a money pit for sponsors. do sponsors love a podium placement more than being forever associated with dirty cheaters? they'd risk it all for modest gains."

To me, this is an interesting comment, because on the surface it may sound true, like come on, this is common sense, but it is far off the reality that it is in front of us everyday. People want to win. They want to be better than others. You go to any gym and there are plenty of people who assume substantial quantities of hormones--test, hgh--just to look better in pictures. You go to any martial arts gym, and there are plenty of people of all ages, including 50+ years old, who are on TRT and more to win some rolls at the gym or dream about winning a cheap medal at a local tournament with 5 people in attendance.

People buy local teams because they want to be known, popular. They want to win. They want to humiliate the owner of the other team. Athletes are getting caught? Well, I strongly condemn their actions, they say.

You can do worse than reading "Speed Trap" or the book by Sandro Donati on doping, if you can find it translated from Italian.

That word can mean several different things. In their sentence "just" means "only", as in "only switched, not stopped", it doesn't mean it was simple which is presumably what you are replying assuming it meant.