(08-11-2013, 12:13 PM)eppie Wrote: Not really. A doping substance is usually put on the black list after it has been used a while. As long as you find more inventive ways of doping you stay ahead of the pack, while probably staying within the 'biking law'.
But it is cheating.
Probably it is even more cheat'iyi to use the substance before it is banned (and technically it is legal) than after it is banned (when you know they test for it).
It is cheating according to whom? There are hundreds of ways of improving performance. Some of them are against the rules. Most of them aren't. As far as I'm concerned, cyclists compete within the existing rules, and cheating means breaking those rules.* There is no grand cosmic definition for "cheating" outside of them.
-Jester
Afterthought: Which is not to say that those rules can't be fuzzy, or arbitrary, or that any given thing "is" or "is not" cheating under a given set of rules. Just that, cheating is not something which has a definition except under a code of rules, whatever that code may be.