I'm not sure if that comment was directed at me, but just in case, I've done medicine and basic research, and I understand science well. The subject of PUDs, especially in cycling, is pretty much a black hole scientifically. Since PUDs are illegal, and even those that aren't/weren't illegal have been deeply frowned upon, no one has done or is going to do the science in a rigorous way, with elite athletes, and publish it. In some events the effects of various PUDs are easy to measure. We know PUDs give significant gains in strength events, and androgenic steroids dramatically improve performance in women in many events. In bike racing it's a trickier subject, and much much harder to show real benefits.

I saw a recent study where amateur cyclists were given EPO and tested, and the results showed negligible benefits. They also reported no side-effects in the subject group, which tells us that they weren't using dosing at a level that it was used in pro cycling, where riders were experiencing blood clots and having a wide variety of dangerous side effects (to the point where some were setting alarms to get up several times a night to move around and break up the blood clots that were forming). The only way to really establish how much of an edge riders like LA and the other elite riders of his era were getting from EPO, blood doping, testosterone, HGH, glucocorticoids, etc. would be to do a multi-year study of the top UCI riders, with appropriate placebo controls. Obviously that's out, as is doing a short-term study on young high-performing volunteers.

So we're left with anecdotal evidence. We're left with stories of top riders talking about the benefits they got, or didn't get, when they went from riding clean to dirty, and back to clean. We're left with studies like this one, with n=1. We're left with assessments by people like LA saying that all the PUDs gave very marginal gains, like 1% or less (i.e., less than you'd get from switching to tires that roll better), except for EPO, which when used at dangerous levels was a more substantial benefit.

There has always been "lore" that has been passed around among coaches/trainers/athletes that is often debunked when rigorously tested. When I was in high school, the baseball coach forbade the baseball team from using the weight room, because it would "tighten up" their muscles and reduce their flexibility. The football coach didn't allow water breaks because that's what his college coaches did, since drinking water when you were hot would "make you sick."

There are drug regimens that will increase lean body mass, for example, but do nothing for physical performance. Caffeine was seen as a substantial performance enhancer, to the point it was briefly banned, but testing shows it's a very minor effect. In most sports, the people in charge are VERY dogmatic about following the their lore, their regimen, their diets. Conconi helped Moser break Merckx record, so he must know the secrets. Let's do what he's doing. I think it's clear that a lot of this stuff was pretty much placebo, or as part of an organized regimen led to more intense training (the benefits of which would accrue even if the PUDs had been skipped). A lot of PUDs were apparently used by riders/teams because they wanted to keep up with this drug arms race and were afraid others might be stealing a march if they didn't.

We know the doctors and scientists who ran the Italian sports doping program (Conconi, Ferrari, et al.) and the Russian program and some of the other long-standing, very organized and well funded programs were working with a lot of elite athletes in a variety of sports, and I'm sure they kept some really good records. It would be interesting if one day all this material were published. It's probably mostly been destroyed, and much of it would likely be of little scientific value (that would require having control groups, and I don't see much evidence that they did that). I suspect this data would show dramatic effects in some sports, and very subtle effects in sports like cycling.

At the end of the day, this self-directed study proves nothing, but it is a negative result. There's a long history of scientists using themselves as a test subject, and only going further when they saw an effect on themselves. In this case, a high-quality doping regimen didn't turn a very good amateur rider into a "monster" rider. If he had doped, and finished on the podium, we would all be saying "Gee, that really seemed to make a huge difference. This seems to be real evidence that it's all about the drugs." Sadly, in both real life and in science, negative studies are easy to ignore. That's why come winter lots of people will be downing vitamin C and Zn instead of chicken soup.