Originally Posted by
79pmooney
There is a huge difference between the drugs of Eddy Merckx' day and now. The drugs then could win you races but if you relied on them time after time, your body could not survive long at the pro level. EPO was a game changer. Those who used it regularly achieved levels never seen before and could maintain those levels.
Another achievement Eddy Merckx achieved was arriving in Paris as the holder of all three jerseys. (It would have been four but the Tour did not have the young rider's jersey yet.)
To Cavendish's credit, I haven't heard him say once that he was anywhere near Merckx' equal. Instead, he credited a woman who had just won her 30th Donne Giro stage as greatest of all time, pointing out that she also won world championships in 3 disciplines (road, track and cyclocross) plus Olympic golds in two.
Yup. Amphetamines alone, booze, etc., could not possibly accomplish over the grueling course of a 3 week grand tour what could later be accomplished with EPO, testosterone and HGH. If anything using too much speed literally kills -- Tom Simpson, for example.
Anquetil doped, unapologetically, mostly occasionally taking speed. Merckx was known to use amphetamines, but couldn't possibly have relied on that for a grand tour or season. I wouldn't be surprised if he used one of the commonly available nasal inhalers that contained amphetamines. Just before the start of his 1972 one-hour record attempt, he could be seen inhaling something from a tube or small jar, and rubbing some inside his nose. I'm old enough to remember when those over-the-counter inhalers contained speed, and they did deliver quite a jolt. Not quite like swallowing orally administered benzies, but a potent, quick acting jolt akin to mainlining a pot of coffee.
With the exception of an arguable technicality: If I'm reading Floyd Landis's statements over the years correctly, blood doping was the real game changer. While EPO, testosterone and HGH were significant, Floyd attributes his superhuman comeback from the stage 16 collapse during the 2006 TdF, to dominate the mountain stage 17, to blood doping. He's still not sure how the tests found abnormal testosterone influences, unless the stored blood was from a training session before the TdF in which he had used a testosterone patch.
I've been interested in the whole sports doping thing for years because it also affects my favorite sport, boxing. Between confessions from former pro boxers, a few guys like Landis, Tyler Hamilton and a few others, it appears that most of them were occasionally micro-dosing EPO *during* races, but as testing became more sophisticated they tended to avoid using EPO and testosterone *during* races. Instead most of them favored blood doping, which was more difficult to detect as long as it didn't significantly impact their baseline labs.
According to some former boxers, cyclists and other athletes, it's during *training* that they used heavier doses of EPO, testosterone and HGH. The goal was to use doping to enable them to work out at superhuman levels without the body breaking down. Some have said that testosterone in particular enabled incredibly fast recovery from hard workouts.
But it also caused bloating from water retention -- hence the telltale moon face and apparent flabbiness that masked the underlying hard muscle. I've seen that in videos and still photos of elite boxers in training, just a few weeks before the title bouts. Yet by fight time they're lean and mean, having tapered off the drugs. To many casual observers they just see a "fat" boxer, and some boxers are notoriously undisciplined in their diets, eating and drinking themselves way beyond their optimal weight class. So it's difficult at a glance to tell the difference. But an undisciplined boxer who's just fat from overeating and drinking cannot regain optimal fitness in just 6-8 weeks, while puffiness from doping *can* be shed quickly without compromising optimal fitness.
Nitpicking, I know, because for years I thought that, for example, Landis had knowingly used testosterone after the stage 16 collapse. There's no reason now for him to lie, so I'll take his word for it that it was a re-infusion of his own blood, which might have come from a batch taken during training when he did wear a testosterone patch.