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Comment by supergirl | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised there is this exception mechanism and nobody brought it up before. if anything, this leak shows that the list of exceptions should be public. I assume it isn't already. For example, I would be interested to see how many exceptions an X time tennis champion has obtained, as I'm sure his competitors would also like to know.

in any case, this exception mechanism is a slippery slope. is it fair to healthy athletes? could the advantage of these banned substances be so big that it could motivate healthy athletes to get sick intentionally? I don't have any hope that wada will improve after this since now it is so easy for them to just say russia did this because they hate us. they also did not improve much after the russian doping scandal, which was only possible because the whole doping test system is flawed.

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The problem with making the exceptions public is you're then making athlete's medical records public. There is a slippery slope here as well that as drugs continue to get added to the list of banned substances, an athlete has to report almost any ailment and it's remedy.

There should be audits of these exceptions and how they're granted, but I don't think it should be public.

In a competition which requires athletes to be in specific medical condition I think it's ok to require from athletes to disclose their medical records if they are the decisive argument on whether athlete should be allowed to take the drugs or not. It's voluntary for athletes to participate in competitions and agree to their terms, so it's not a violation of their rights.

You don't need to make the ailment public. Simply the exception that was granted.

If it's okay to to report when athletes are banned from a sport due to substance X in their blood/urine (e.g. sooo many cyclists and EPO), surely it should be okay to report that "substance X will be found, but this time they are being given an exception".

That's the same thing it's like reporting some one is taking a cocktail of anti virals instead of saying they got AIDS.

Steroids and other banned substances are constantly perscribed for medical issues and if an athlete takes a steroid cream for something that would appear on the exception list.

I'm sorry, but I think that if you want to run on a track against the best in the world while everybody else is watching, you have to be willing to give up some privacy.

Basically the world becomes interested in how your body works and you have to let them know.

Why is there such an exception at all? If there is a list of banned substances and they are found, it shouldn't really matter if they were prescribed by a doctor or not, they could still aid performance (which is why they were banned, right?).

I agree that the list of exceptions (at least the number of exceptions and the date granted per athlete) needs to be public.

Using steroids to fight an infection or getting hormonal treatment as part of a fertility treatments does not increases anyone's performances but they still will appear on their constant blood and urine tests.

Let's say some scientifically advanced team find the way to use weakened infection as the way to get clearance for using steroids. If played properly, this can be one-time boost for the whole team that may give them many medals in Olympics. Neither initial assessment, nor audit may not find the truth, but some other people with better motivation and more time could find it based on analysis of medical records. Do you think this scenario should be dismissed in favor of privacy?

they're typically different steroids, though... androgenic/anabolic steroids are a subset of all steroids, and they certainly aren't used to treat inflammation

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