I thought I would start a new thread on this because it deserves its own discussion. It often seems as though the 80s is somehow seen as sort of a "clean" era of pro-cycling compared with the 90s because as we all know, rhEPO was developed in the mid-late 80s and became widely available by the 90s. Greg Lemond's is often cited as the bar to which any clean GT winner must be compared to. But have people forgotten about East Germany?
Systematic doping in sports was widespread in the 80s and it has been known since the 1960s that androgens stimulate erthyropoesis, yet reliable tests were far less available. Blood doping was experimented with in the early 80s and it wasn't even a banned method until about 1984 or thereabouts.
So why would pro-cycling, with its history of PED use dating back long before the 1980s, suddenly stop using the most potent ergogenic substances available at the time? I suspect that the medicos of the day would have been well aware of the ergogenic potential of steroids for cycling. Hence I'm fairly skeptical about using the best cyclists from that era as some sort of "gold standard" for the upper boundary of what can be achieved with "clean" physiology.
Systematic doping in sports was widespread in the 80s and it has been known since the 1960s that androgens stimulate erthyropoesis, yet reliable tests were far less available. Blood doping was experimented with in the early 80s and it wasn't even a banned method until about 1984 or thereabouts.
So why would pro-cycling, with its history of PED use dating back long before the 1980s, suddenly stop using the most potent ergogenic substances available at the time? I suspect that the medicos of the day would have been well aware of the ergogenic potential of steroids for cycling. Hence I'm fairly skeptical about using the best cyclists from that era as some sort of "gold standard" for the upper boundary of what can be achieved with "clean" physiology.