Doping in professional cycling is as old as the sport is. Major Taylor, the first great American professional cyclist, had to pull out of a 6 day race in Madison Square Garden in 1896 because he thought a man was chasing him around the track with a knife, and that hallucination is generally attributed to drug use. When Italian cycling legend Fausto Coppi was asked if he took amphetamines, he replied “Yes, and those who claim otherwise, it’s not worth talking to them about cycling.” Doping wasn’t banned in the Tour de France until 1965 with the death from amphetamine use by Tom Simpson. But when race officials banned doping, they didn’t make the course any shorter or any easier, so doping continued and is still probably going on today. I watch the Tour every year, and I just assume that the riders are doing something besides their insane dietary and training regimes to be competitive, because why wouldn’t they? If the riders aren’t willing to do the same things that their rivals are to win, they might as well just stay home.

No major professional sport is clean of doping, or ever has been. Before testing for performance enhancing drugs began, old time major league baseball players used to party hard every night and then get up and play an early afternoon day game because that’s all there were. Gee, how’d they do that day after day?

If someone were to make the argument that in a collective society such things as sports doping wouldn’t be necessary, they should keep in mind that the Soviet Union and East Germany were pioneers in the field of performance enhancing drugs, and also in evading testing for the same. Of course both countries had an unlimited number of human subjects to test them on.