del1962 said:Not sure about this, I suspect people like Di Luca want to inflate the numbers to self justify their own doping.
Yeah, absolutely. My guess is that those who are practising 'legalized doping' (use of TUEs for non-therapeutic purposes that nonetheless conforms to the requirements of the official paper trail, or other not-yet-explicitly-banend methods akin to transfusions before they were outlawed) think of themselves as clean, and estimate that (for example) 20% of other riders are using EPO etc. Meanwhile, those who've been caught want to claim that everyone's doing it, and who are using EPO but haven't been caught don't see a distinction between what they're doing and the 'legalized' methods, and come up with estimates that doping is near-universal.
The two estimates are not necessarily incompatible. It depends on how the riders justify (including to themselves) what they are doing.