Hah! Yeah, that pretty much would have been it.

This film does make me rethink PUDs in pro cycling a bit. Not that I think they're OK (they aren't), or that they don't give an advantage to some elite riders, but the degree of benefit is probably less than I've thought. Robert Millar has talked (convincingly to my ears) about winning grand tour stages early in his career while clean, at a time when EPO and other PEDs were common and widely used. I don't know if anyone was winning grand tours during this era while clean (I don't think so), but it appears that it was possible to be very near the top of the game, at least in stages and one-day races, by using talent and naturally great physiology and excellent training.

There's good research that, at least for young elite male athletes, testosterone and HGH give at best very tiny benefits, if any at all. Cortisone and other glucocorticoids definitely decrease inflammation and can help a rider keep riding when their body is overtaxed, but they will cause significant problems when used chronically. They don't seem to make one faster, just allow someone who should be calling it quits to keep going in the late stages of a grand tour. Anabolic steroids would seem to not be anything road cyclists would want to mess with - bulky muscles aren't the goal.

It's really blood doping (transfusing blood) and Epo, when used very aggressively, that seems to give a truly unfair advantage. With current testing of hematocrit, living/training at altitude seems to give as much benefit as one could get with EPO. The biggest cheat I can see happening now, in pro cycling, would be to use a transfusion for a rider whose blood count has dropped during the later stages of a grand tour. Extreme chronic exercise can drop the blood count significantly, and bumping an elite rider's hematocrit from say 38 to 48 overnight would be the difference between being shot out the back of the peloton on the last big climb to being able to hang with the group.

It's interesting that when you read some of the personal accounts of pro riders crossing over to using PUDs, that in all the accounts I've read they were generally taking a one-size-fits-all dosing regimen, and that regimen wasn't studied in relation to their performance and training. They just started to get a bag of pills to take, and later they'd start getting injections on a schedule with the rest of the team. My sense is that a lot of what they were taking was providing very marginal gains, and in some cases no real gains at all, since it was done in a completely scattershot fashion. It reminds me of doctors prescribing antibiotics when there's no definite evidence of a bacterial infection, "just in case it'll help."