The difficult thing about anti-doping in amateur athletes is that the stakes are way too low to be testing that frequently, unless you are at the very top of th

The difficult thing about anti-doping in amateur athletes is that the stakes are way too low to be testing that frequently, unless you are at the very top of the amateur range. And when you stop doping your fitness gains don't disappear if you continue to train. One of EPO's main benefits (as I understand it) is to improve recovery and allow one to train harder. So an athlete could use EPO for a year, training harder and more frequently than they otherwise would and then stop the next year and enter competition with a lot of their previous fitness gains carried over.