Like steroids, EPO's effects can be striking.Studies on it are less comprehensive, but one (albeit not conducted on elite athletes) suggested improvements in maximum rate of oxygen consumption of 12%, and a 54% increase in the time it took participants to be exhausted by hard exercise.Dr Schumacher reckons improvements of the performances of top-flight athletes on a bike or a running track are more likely to be in the single digits.But if that sounds modest, it should not. A 5% improvement would be enough to knock more than six minutes off a top marathon-runner's time.History offers another lens. The "heroic age" of doping, when testing was poor and abuse often blatant, lasted from the 1970s to the early 2000s.Sprinters competed with eyes yellowed from steroid abuse.Female athletes sported strikingly masculine physiques.Cyclists made seemingly rocket-assisted climbs up steep Alpine passes.Sport is littered with "fossil" records from that era.Of 16 pertinent women's trackand-field events, for example, the world records in eight have stood since the 1980s.Eye-popping performance alone does not prove records were set by doped athletes.But it does cast doubt. Florence Griffith Joyner's 100-metre-sprint time of 10.49 seconds was set in 1988.
