[stefs]

ah, the magic undetectable drug that's just the right kind of effective without the pesky side effects, which you'd need other undetectable drugs for.

this drug would be worth a lot of money, but we'll keep secret except just for the one top performer, because wide distribution would increase the risk of a leak substantially.

and remember: the top performers getting busted would probably mean the end of pro cycling as we know it for decades. 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. a young superstar would trade a life of a good salaried position with some more money but also a high risk of being banned from the sport forever, thus no source of income at all and also the questionable title of being the killer of a whole sport.

so imo: it's possible, but unlikely.

[pge]

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.

[stefs]

i'm unconvinced. EPO was undetectable, but not anymore. new undetectable substance would run the risk of being detectable in a few years. who would ignore whistleblowers today? and the USADA did bring the hammer down on LA at some point.

sure, they pay off is high, but the risk - at least in cycling - is even higher, exactly because they've been caught once and now all eyes are on them. if pog gets popped, nobody will trust cycling to be clean ever again; it's hard enough today, as this thread proves.

[pge]

We can agree to disagree. People said cycling would be clean after the '98 Festina affair because all eyes were on them. All that happened was that teams (that could afford it) switched from EPO to blood doping. The next Tour after everyone said the Festina bust had cleaned up cycling was Lance Armstrong's first win (1999).

[ruszki]

Looking at how Armstrong and Contador are revived, there is not much downside getting caught years after doping.

[labcomputer]

EPO was always detectable. The trouble was detecting synthetic EPO. In fact, the maker of synthetic EPO (Amgen) was the title sponsor of the Tour of California!

After they developed that test stage speeds dropped dramatically. Now speeds are back up to where they were right before the EPO test was developed. You really think that’s natural?

Cycling has a doping scandal once every decade or two. Why would another one kill the sport this time when it never did before?

[stefs]

yeah, i think i'm convinced.

[0xAFFFF]

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.

[GateCrasher]

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.

[labcomputer]

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?

[sjw987]

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.

[littlestymaar]

> 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…

[stefs]

this also supports my point, though: armstrong got caught. he was stripped of all his titles. there were whistleblowers (even though they were ignored back then). everybody knew they were cheating but nobody did anything about it ... well, until they did.

i don't know how hard pro cycling was affected after his bust, i just remember reading that it took a few years to recover (i.e. a few teams got dissolved, some sponsors jumped ship).

even today, if you talk about cycling to an outside person the FIRST thing they ask you about is doping.

so in my opinion, professional cycling is on its doping redemption part - forced, whether they want it or not - because if they (and by "they" i mean Pog) get popped big time again, it's going to be viewed as irredeemable. they'd have had their chance after LA and blew it.

[le-mark]

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.

[borroka]

"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.