There's a pretty clear solution for that in athletics which is sometimes implemented. They take blood samples and store them for decades. New methods can come along and analyze the data and detect fraud long after the fact.

The same can be done in science, it just more disclosure of data.

This doesn't really help, though? My understanding is that in the sports where doping was a thing, if you wanted to be competitive at top level, you basically had to find a way to dope. This isn't something 'just the winners' did. Near everyone was doing it.

So, yeah, you can look for it with later testing, but all that will do is claw back a winner. It doesn't help anyone that wasn't doing it. Is why none of us have any clue who the best cyclist during the Armstrong era was. With the scary view that the cheating was so widespread that the current winners were still the best if everyone stopped cheating.

Of course you can't fix the past before they started retaining samples.

The point is to prevent people from doping moving forward because they know they can be caught.

If we had better data on cyclists from when Armstrong was racing, you could absolutely claw back the Awards and give them to the best cyclist that wasn't doping.

I think that misses just how entrenched doping was. As mind blowing as it is, it is fairly safe to say that everyone that was making the leaderboards was likely cheating.

Probably the entire peloton was -- if so, can it still be considered cheating?

Of course, not everybody used EPO and not everybody who did used as much as Riis, Ullrich, Pantani, Virenque, Armstrong, Zabel, Hamburger... Blood doping existed long before EPO. Amphetamines (and strychnine!) were used long before blood doping. Induráin almost certainly used either EPO or blood doping.

EPO and blood doping can still be used (and are likely still used) but noone can push it to the dangerous extremes of the 90's. That will be caught (because such hematocrit values aren't allowed anymore -- and it's easy to test for).

You are still trying to fix the past which is impossible and not addressing the possibility of fixing things moving forward.

For a lot of people, they are most interested in the recognition and achievement. You are basically saying "you may be a footnote as someone that should have won, if the others weren't caught cheating years later." Right? I can see how that is less than comforting. (Especially so with no way of knowing who all is actively cheating at the time.)

I can't say it is a bad idea to try, mind you. It could very well work. I just have my doubts.

They still all are. Just not as brazenly as the past. More nuanced, more systematic, but overall less of it is happening.