A world expert on asthma in sport believes it is normal 21% of athletes competing for Great Britain at the Athens Olympics in 2004 had the condition, as noted by Alberto Salazar in his lengthy denial of doping allegations.
Salazar, who wrote an open letter on the Nike Oregon Project website this week following a series of allegations, said only eight of the 55 professional athletes he coached during his career had been diagnosed with exercise-induced asthma.
Galen Rupp, who is coached by Salazar alongside Mo Farah, required a therapeutic use exemption from the World Anti-Doping Agency earlier in his career to receive asthma medication. Salazar denied manipulating tests for asthma and pointed out that the proportion of his athletes who had the condition, 14.5%, was lower than the average in the US and British teams at Athens 2004.
Dr John Dickinson, an expert on the subject from Kent University, worked on the 2005 report that Salazar referenced in his letter, and described why the prevalence of exercise-induced asthma is so high among athletes when compared to the general population.
“What’s causing the higher prevalence are the risk factors that the athletes are putting themselves through,” he said. “If we look at exercise-induced asthma, the main trigger is breathing unconditioned air into your lower airways. If you think about when you’re at rest, most of the air you breath comes through the nose and can therefore be warmed, humidified and filtered. It protects your lungs from potential provocation and inflammation that would lead to an asthma response.
“An athlete increases their breathing rate which results in them switching from nose breathing to mouth breathing. In sports such as cycling, running and swimming they are going to breathe 99% of air through their mouth. They are also going to breathe a lot of air. It means their lower airways are going to have to do a lot of the conditioning, causing an inflammatory response and then a bronchial restriction around the airways.
“Because athletes are subjecting themselves to this ventilation over a prolonged period of time, they’re more likely to develop an asthmatic tendency. In the general population we see the same thing for people who have jobs in a polluted environment.”
The national asthma rate in Britain is around 8-10% and Dickinson dismissed the notion that inhalers could be used to enhance an athlete’s performance unless used in extreme excess. He added: “If inhaler drugs are taken as prescribed, in therapeutic doses, there’s not really any evidence to show they improve performance. If you take ridiculously high doses, there is perhaps potential to improve sprinting power.”
