D-Queued said:
I dunno.
Why don't you ask Filipe Casado?
Oh, yeah. He's dead.
Dave.
"LeMond finished seventh in that Tour, vowing to himself that he could win clean the next year. It was not to be. In 1992, he continued, “our [team’s] performance was abysmal, and I couldn’t even finish the race.” Nondoping cyclists were burning out trying to keep up with their doping competitors. LeMond recounted a story told to him by one of his teammates at the time, Philippe Casado. Casado learned from a rider named Laurent Jalabert, who was racing for the Spanish cycling team ONCE, that Jalabert’s personal doping program was entirely organized by the ONCE team. That program, LeMond said, included r-EPO, which LeMond refused to take, thereby consigning himself to another DNF (“did not finish”) in 1994, his final race.
Some who did go along with the pressure to dope paid an even higher price. Casado, for instance, left LeMond’s team to join one that had a doping program—and died suddenly in 1995 at age 30. Whether his death resulted directly from doping is not known, but when HCT reaches around 60 percent and higher, the blood becomes so thick that clots readily form. The danger is particularly high when the heart rate slows during sleep—and the resting heart rates of endurance athletes are renowned for measuring in the low 30s (in beats per minute). Two champion Dutch riders died of heart attacks after experimenting with r-EPO. Some riders reportedly began sleeping with a heart-rate monitor hooked to an alarm that would sound when their pulse dropped too low."
Here is a link to this and an abundance of USADA and other Doping related stories -- Lots of side effects, the most abundent being banned from competition and the tragic occasional death.
http://www.makingtherules.com/THE-DOPING-SAGA