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Yeah, it's extremely likely people are already using shit like this. The Inspired to Ride, Trans Am film with 'the Italians' had a bit where it was hinted at by Juliana Buhring (it didn't seem to be in jest but who knows). It's tested for over here in CTT events (a 12hr "champ" was busted for Modafinil specifically) but no one does testing in ultras unless they're the big supported ones like RAAM and RAA, etc.
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Yeah, as @hippy wrote. I suspect people are exploiting this shit already. I don't like it and might end up doing only longer races where this becomes unsustainable. However, then another "performance-enhancing" drug comes to play: pain killers.
I guess this sport is between a rock and a hard place. Either regulation comes in and then I'm unsure how they'll take responsibility for safety on open roads etc., or it remains deregulated and people will simply "cheat" (if we can call pill-taking cheating).
One thing that could be implementable would be complete transparency. That is: you must make all your training data public if you want to start in a race. Strava data would do to begin with. Later, this could be improved on. The idea being that of a biological passport (except more basic & cheaper). Then enthusiasts could crunch data and see how off-the-scales crazy a performance was given the stuff a person does in training. If someone consistently races "above his/her" abilities, then suspicion would exist. If that's good or bad, I'm not sure. What to do with it, I'm also not sure :).
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hippy
plentyfatty
@ewanmac
Following on from the conversation about sleep in the AMR, is there any suggestion that such punishing sleep schedules might increase the likelihood of riders taking alertness drugs like modafinil etc? Obviously this strikes me as undesirable but it would be pretty hard to check up on and the incentives would increase if races became a “staying awake” competition.