So in an even field, Evans wins and I'm supposed to believe that in 2011 everyone just stopped using blood doping? Or was he beating riders who got a 10-15% boost from blood doping?
One pertinent question is if there is any basis for the 10-15 % boost in FTP with blood doping? I am more on the skeptical side, mainly because:
1) The calculated Vo2Max boosts are at most ~ 15 % (with some outliers) in the EPO/transfusion papers with recreational / amateur level athletes. Perhaps athletes can in some circumstances use significantly larger amounts of blood/EPO than are used in academic papers (in the 1990s).
2) in the rare meta-analyses and reviews of many studies, there is a clear pattern of elites getting a smaller boost than the more mediocre athletes.
3) There are also other factors than oxygen availability and Vo2Max setting the FTP, OBLA and running/cycling speed, and these do not tend to increase in tandem with elevated Vo2Max in the published papers. In the few transfusion papers measuring running speed, a 10-15 % increase in Vo2Max has increased running speed by only by some 2-4 %.
In any case, even if the increase in FTP was only 3-5 % or 6-9 % instead of 10-15 %, one still should at least question the possibility of clean athletes beating dopers in the past.