I will start out by saying I am not looking for arguments exonerating any rider, or exonerating the peloton/sport. It appears to be a sport where lots of athletes dope. I am just curious about the science.
I've been wondering about the studies behind blood/urine testing, and how they study the conditions of a grand tour. A GT is pretty much the epitome of an extreme biological event for a human body - three weeks of riding 6-7 hours a day, something like 10,000 calories of food consumed every day, how many liters of water/fluids I don't know.
So how are the blood/urine tests evaluated? Do they take a sample of extreme athletes, cyclists or whatever, and put them through extreme conditions, monitor their blood/urine daily/hourly, have a control group that does not dope? Or are these studies done on more "normal" humans and/or in more "normal" conditions, and then the data from the study extrapolated to the extreme conditions?
Is this science like the dose/response science that forms part of how we determine what is cancerous, testing lab animals at high doses and inferring what happens to humans at lower doses?
I'm just wondering how anyone knows what is normal for a body to do in a GT, and therefore know what is an outlying magnitude.