You’re not familiar with the culture of cycling in the last 30 years.
Oh they don’t check you?
Sure, they check for doping. The problem is that it is just too easy to cheat the tests.
Doping in various ways has been part of the cycling world really since the very beginning of competitive cycling. It was mainly amphetamines prior to the development of steroids and prior to blood doping.
Erythropoietin(EPO) was the drug that demolished the notion that someone could race clean and still be competitive. For a long time there was no test for EPO, so the people in charge tried to limit its use by not allowing a hematocrit of more than 50. When an actual test for EPO became available, the doping doctors and cyclists found that they could beat the test by microdosing EPO( by injecting small amounts under the skin.) They could calibrate how much EPO they could take and how long it would take to clear from their system. They also found that they could use EPO to mask blood doping. Blood doping(removing blood from a cyclist and transfusing it back in at a later date) results in an abnomally high proportion of mature red blood cells. EPO stimulates production of new, thus young, red blood cells which helps hide the blood doping. I think it was Andy Hampsten who said that before EPO a racer could be clean and still compete because the other drugs had enough negatives that someone who wasn’t using wasn’t at too huge of a disadvantage.
As far as beating the tests, It’s mainly about making sure the drugs have cleared a cyclist’s system enough by the time a test is likely to occur, injecting saline to dilute the concentration of drugs in the system(or to decrease the hematocrit to an acceptable number), and watching out for testers and avoiding them when necessary. George Hincapie(Armstrong teammate) has ridden in more Tours de France than anyone in the history of the race and never tested positive for drugs. He has admitted using them. It was standard practice for cycling teams during Armstrong’s era(and unfortunately probably still is). Tyler Hamilton(also an Armstrong teammate) is another cyclist who passed many, many tests while being a habitual doper. He was only caught because apparently someone mixed up his blood doping bag with someone else’s, and a test showed he had someone else’s blood in his system.
Cyclists joke that a doping test is really an I.Q. test. That’s how easy it is to beat the tests.