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Treating or Cheating? The TUE Question

Recent fallout over the hacking of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s athlete medical data files has been far-reaching. Most of the world now knows which champion athletes have competed using a therapeutic use exemption, or TUE; the use of doctor-prescribed medication in and/or out of competition.  Despite this unfair invasion of the athletes’ privacy by a hacking group called Fancy Bears, the old ethical question has again been raised – as to whether the TUE is a progressive development to preserve health and equitable career opportunities, or whether it is simply another loop-hole which can be exploited by certain athletes to win at any cost. Cycling, like many other sports overseen by the WADA codes, allows athletes to receive TUEs from their respective national anti-doping organizations, but only after rigorous medical testing and diagnosis confirmation. The most recognizable examples...

Doped Athletes as Enhancement Models for the 21st Century

  by John Hoberman   (Note:  John Hoberman is the author of   MORTAL ENGINES: The Science of Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport (1992),  TESTOSTERONE DREAMS: Rejuvenation, Aphrodisia, Doping (2005),  and many articles on the history and sociology of doping.  He is a professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.) By now even those of us who take little or no interest in sports are aware that many elite athletes have become dependent on doping drugs to perform at the world-class level. In the media, the doping scandals that have erupted in Major League Baseball, the Tour de France, and in various Olympic sports are routinely presented as resulting from transgressions committed by corrupt athletes who have betrayed their athletic communities. The incentives to dope that are built into the system by politicians, sports federations, and corporate sponsors...