The sport is quite definitely NOT doing much better keeping the sport clean. Two major GC riders got their hands slapped last year, one testing positive and the other being detained by police for potentially being involved in trafficking doping products. Try including the pre-'98 data to see how important that big bust of the Festina affair was in that graph, and look at the only time there was a spike in increasing the number of riders caught is between 2009 and 2010, when riders caught in the 2007-8 period when cycling was cleaning up its act and following Operación Puerto would be returning from suspension (so the likes of Basso for example).
In 2006 through 2008 we made huge positive strides in anti-doping. The pièce de resistance was AFLD unveiling that they had a test for CERA in the middle of the 2008 Tour, which they had kept under wraps specifically to make sure they outed the dopers, because we were coming off a super-peaking era where riders would do little racing outside of targeted races, and so out of competition testing was harder to succeed with. That was all undone in 2009 with the UCI wresting control of testing back from AFLD and Pierre Bordry getting fired from his job. ASO got scared by the loss of the US audience following Armstrong's retirement and the demise of Landis, and then the German audience being lost after the TV channels refused to carry the race following successive scandals. The return of Armstrong was accepted at any price necessary, and a lot of the old veteran dopers who had been slowly filtering towards retirement suddenly had Indian summers. We also had a number of riders who were caught in that period (and into 2009) who talked, and resulted in other riders being busted or doping docs and distributors brought to heel. Patrik Sinkewitz, Emanuele Sella, Bernhard Kohl and Thomas Frei all were open about what they had done, and a few years down the line Floyd Landis and Michael Rasmussen would join them.
But we're now completely in the dark. The only time a big gun gets caught is when the police get involved like in Operation Aderlass or with Supermán or the W52 fiasco, or when the UCI kicks an own goal, and their lawyers have curled up in the corner and hid when faced with big money. Huge holes have been poked in the efficacy of the biopassport by cases such as Roman Kreuziger's, and the way minuscule probabilities have been able to be used to explain away positives and riders have been able to evade bans, such as in the cases of Daryl Impey and, yes, Chris Froome (whose medical history to explain the test via a combination of dehydration and illnesses sits in stark contrast to the actual performance on the day of the positive test), and nowadays it feels very much like the riders are only being pinged for minor things because it's all they can catch. Or maybe it's all they want to catch. After all, look at that graph: the sport is getting cleaner, or at least that's the perception, because there are no longer as many known dopers riding around. It doesn't matter that the speeds are up to what they were at the peak of the 90s EPO era, it doesn't matter that we're seeing riders achieving the kind of feats that fans baulked at even at the height of the Armstrong era (Wout van Aert's mountain performances, Pogačar's northern Classics, Geraint Thomas' rebirth as a GC rider in his 30s and winning the Tour de France). It doesn't matter that we now have people like Thomas and Vingegaard returning to the calendars of the super-peakers, entering few races and then emerging at the season's target at peak level in a manner that the biological passport was designed to prevent. It doesn't matter that these guys are putting out the exact same performance levels and behaviours that have had fans ironically enjoying the Volta a Portugal for years - the casual fan doesn't compare the climbing times to those of Pantani, Zülle, Rominger and their ilk.
Because riders aren't getting caught and nobody is talking, we don't know what's going on in the way we did 10-15 years ago. The Clinic may be overly paranoid and explain away everything via doping using some frivolous and at times ridiculous arguments ("Sagan ate loads of gummi bears, it must be a sign of replacing sugars because of doping!" for example), but a lot of the time, buried among the innuendos and accusations would be some genuine insight. And these guys who were elite athletic talents and who were doping up to their eyeballs are now minutes slower than the current guys. Sports science has only gone so far in that time though - the fact the UCI controls the message on doping is a huge conflict of interest because they have a vested interest in the sport not having the negative reputation that its doping history has brought it. The graph also raises some interesting queries, such as whether the graph would count somebody like, say, Giovanni Visconti, who was not sanctioned for doping but did serve a suspension for connections to Michele Ferrari? Known doping docs like Ibarguren are still in the sport. Hell, Marcos Maynar was involved in a bust last year, the guy responsible for LA-MSS in 2008! Top teams are coached and managed by known dopers and former managers of doped teams. Top riders are still being busted, we saw Miguel Ángel López and Nairo Quintana hounded out of the top level just this last off-season. They just aren't popping positive for EPO anymore - whether there is a new wonder-drug that is improving performances but is not yet banned, so everybody is taking it within the rules, whether the dopers and docs have got smarter to avoid tripping the wires, or whether the efficacy of the tests is less meaning fewer riders are caught (or the efficacy of the tests to stand up to legal scrutiny in the wake of cases like Kreuziger, Froome and Impey meaning that the cases against the riders have to be stronger now to trip the wire than they used to be so fewer riders are getting sanctioned publicly for their digressions) or whether the UCI is simply not targeting testing or announcing positives, that's the bit we don't know.
But I'm willing to put my hand in the fire and say there's a cocktail of some or all of those reasons that are why the number of positives and sanctioned riders is as low as it is, not that the péloton is almost totally paniagua now, because I don't believe for a second that what I've been watching in 2023 is cleaner than what I was watching in 2008 when the dopers who didn't get the memo about the sport trying to clean up were made to look like absolutely ridiculous outliers - and were going slower than the riders of today.
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