How did lance armstrong not get caught for doping for so many years? If its that hard to get caught then should we be worried about other althletes?
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Armstrong hired experts at doping who not only knew about the latest and greatest drugs and how to incorporate them in a training regime but also exactly how the anti-doping agencies worked and what they were able to detect and how. So they planned the entire season including training sessions and competitions around how they were getting the best out of each drug and how to avoid getting caught.
The hard part about detecting these drugs is that most of the drugs they take are the exact same chemicals that the body makes naturally but in different quantities. In some types of doping you are even tricking the body into making its own drugs. So while you may be able to detect a certain chemical that is supposed to be there and it is hard to prove that the chemical is the process of doping rather then naturally generated by the body.
A typical regime would include injecting steroids during the off season to promote muscle growth during training. Then a period without any drugs to get them out of your system. Then taking out lots of blood from your system to be used later. For the buildup to the season you would take EPO to promote the production of more red blood cells. This can be kept up throughout the competition season. Other drugs such as pain killers and verious hormone treatments may also be taken to help restitution and to make it easier to compete. If the EPO is not enough to give you superhuman blood count then use some of the blood from the off-season and give yourself a blood transfusion.
Armstrong was not the only cyclist who were doping himself. There are few people he competed against who we can clear of doping, largely because they were losing to all the doped riders. The Tour de France have even given up trying to hand out some of their gold medals as the previous holder was found to be doping because they have to go so far down the list of competitors that there is no point any more. And cycling is not the only sport with doped athletes.
The good news is that we are actually catching the doped athletes. Sometimes years after the fact but we are getting much better at it. Samples taken at events can be stored for long times until they can be tested using new techniques. And it have become more and more common to test throughout the year so that athletes can not dope themselves during the off-season. And we will notice jumps in natural hormones.
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