Originally Posted by
wphamilton
It may be more fair if they test winners for drugs (or maybe not), but if they want the most fair competition they'd forget about it and let people choose. In any event there is some point where intrusion into personal business is unwarranted. An amateur event checking your body chemistry is over the line to me, and I'm obstinate about keeping drugs out of my system.
Problem is that EPO is a dangerous PED and that's not an exaggeration. Unless you constantly are monitoring hematocrit it's possible for your blood to thicken, when you aren't active, to the extent that you can die in your sleep from a heart attack (which has happened to a number of pros when EPO first came on the pro scene).
Having to have a doctor or machine to measure hematocrit takes the sport completely out of the realm of what should be amateur sports where teens compete. And this is not the only case where an amateur got busted for PEDs. So if I had a kid into the sport it would be fine with me if testing were common.
Personally I can much better understand pros doing this for big money, especially when the atmosphere pressured riders into going along with the program. But to do this in the amateurs is just nuts. If I were benevolent dictator I'd be dealing out lifetime bans for bringing this kind of PED into amateur sports.
This old fool must have had to turn somebody else over for this to get only a two year ban.