Pantani

As for the argument that everyone else was doing it, therefore the best riders won, it’s a lot more complicated than that. A lot depends on how your body reacts to drugs. Just as Armstrong had tremendous good fortune to respond well to treatments for his illness, everyone responds differently to doping. Charly Wegelius [now Garmin-Sharp sport director] had a wonderful quote in his book: “I had a naturally high hematocrit, I was the one with the athletic gift, and I was getting penalized for it.”
What doping does is take away our criteria for judgment. You just have to put a thick red line through it; we just don’t know, and we cannot indulge in some sort of “what if.”

From the Matt Rendell article