I don’t think that’s true anymore. It used to be, but all the secret secrets have been revealed and they test for them. That doesn’t make up, however, for the studied conceit that the teams, their physicians and the UCI itself all okayed.
Yeah, we boomers had it easier. We could go to state funded colleges that were nearly free compared to now. But there was always the omnipresent terror of being dragged into an unwinnable war in Southeast Asia and the discovery of drugs, especially bad drugs, that was a real scourge.