i've watched like 4 documentaries on lance armstrong, so I'm clearly an expert on this subject matter.
cpd is correct that epo injected in the blood stream will be gone with a night's sleep. the traditional administration of epo was done just under the skin, where the drug is gradually adsorbed by the body. how that plays with the short halflife of the drug? beats me.. but that's how it was done until they came up with the drug test. They then started to inject it into the bloodstream for much faster delivery to the blood stream, but because this also meant it would be flushed out by the kidneys much faster, it required more frequent administration. meanwhile, that italian dude who played team discovery's evil doctor came up with blood transfusion, where blood was extracted from the body during training, centrifuged to extract the good stuff from the plasma, and injected back into the rider shortly prior to the race, by which time the rider's blood values would have recovered from the initial blood loss. But as you can imagine, there's a lot of moving parts, and **** can easily go wrong, like mixing up people's blood, keeping the blood fresh and sanitary, the large delta in temperature between the blood extract and the rider's body temp, the delta in pressure that needs to be compensated for upon injection (I'm no doctor, but putting the **** back in has got to be a lot harder than taking that **** out), and of course, having certified people to handle all this ****, which was not the case in a lot of cases.
in short, not worth it.. don't we have a forum member who has first hand experience with this?
P.S. you can detect blood doping. lance's 2009 tour was supposedly a clean tour, to prove that he can do it without the drugs. but his blood hermatocrit was suspiciously high right before one of the crucial mountain stages that secured his podium in the overall. it's supposed to drop throughout the stages, but his increased.