Here's what Andy Hampsten said:

"I saw Greg (Lemond) race as a champion through the 80s, and into the 90s when the cycling community as a whole turned a blind eye towards doping and consciously ignored the onslaught of EPO in the peloton,” Andy Hampsten told Velo News in 2004. “Like Greg, I, too, saw what I believe were the effects of EPO when it entered pro cycling in the early 90s. In the first years it grew froma few individuals reaping obscene wins from exploiting its ‘benefits’,to entire teams relying on it, essentially forcing all but the most gifted racers to either use EPO to keep their place in cycling, quit or become just another obscure rider in the group.

The quintessential grimpeur, Hampsten was a former Giro winner and had won on Alpe d’Huez in 1992, placing 4th overall that year. Even by 1993 he was struggling and in that year’s Tour he was 8th, behind the unheralded Zenon Jaskula and Johan Bruyneel, amongst others (he could manage a top-ten in most of the mountain stages, except for a disastrous 32nd, just over 4 minutes down, on the seven-climb monster 15th stage in the Pyrenees).

“Everyone knows everyone else’s relative abilities. Of course, that changes, people get better and get worse, but it was an open secret from the early 90s on,” Hampsten said in an interview this year. For him, he noted at the time in other reports, he knew what his capabilities were and was relatively consistent from year to year in the level he reached and when he peaked. The problem was with everyone else.

“It went, during the 90s, it went from, ‘Wow, I’m not winning; it’s getting a lot harder to win a race that’s either a time trial or has hills or mountains’, to ‘it’s really hard to stay with the first group of fifty guys’.”

http://le-grimpeur.net/blog/archives/99