fair is fair wrote:
Then put an asterik next to all the athletes who train and live at altitude or ban them too. Why should they have the alititude edge and no one else?
It's true that the tent creates a low oxygen environment by increasing nitrogen level of the air, but nitrogen provides no fitness boost and makes up 78% of earth's air anyways.
The responses to the original poster's proposal to ban the use of altitude tents continue to be remarkably bad.
First, as a matter of physiology, there is a HUGE difference between, on the one hand, living and training at an altitude of, for example, 6,000-7,000 feet (typical for many Kenyan and Ethiopian runners) and, on the other hand, spending eight to twelve hours a day breathing gas that (whether by increasing nitrogen, decreasing oxygen, or lowering pressure) simulates oxygen transport conditions typically found at 12,000 to 13,000 feet altitude while continuing to train under conditions in which oxygen is much more readily transported. Laboratory experiments have generally shown very little, if any, increased EPO production or increased red blood cell mass in moving from sea level to moderate (6,000 to 7,000 feet) altitude, although the concentration of red blood cells will typically increase because of a decrease in total blood plasma volume. Breathing gasses with lower oxygen concentrations for eight to twelve hours a day, however, will cause significant increases in endogenous EPO production and red blood cell mass, without a corresponding drop in blood plasma volume and without requiring a reduction in training intensity. The use of so-called "altitude tents" is, physiologically, much more similar to blood-doping by autologous red blood cell reinfusion or exogenous EPO injection than it is to living and training at moderately high altitude.
More importantly, however, the responses to the original poster's proposal to ban altitude tents are generally based on incorrect assumptions about the reasons for banning various practices, which generally have little to do with notions of leveling the playing field among competitors, and much more to do with cultural norms about the nature of sport and the costs of policing the rules. Leveling the playing field is relatively easy; for example, you can add weights to faster runners (as is done in handicapped horse races) or give time bonuses to slower runners (similar to golf handicaps, which give stroke bonuses to inferior performers). You can subdivide competitive fields beyond the usual age and sex divisions to include height, weight, and BMI or ponderal index divisions (as is done to various extents in such competitions as boxing, wrestling, bodybuilding, and the occasional "Clydesdale" running competition). You can even "level the playing field" by permitting everyone to dope up to a certain level (as was effectively done through the use of hematocrit ceilings in tour cycling during the past decade).
Deciding what comports with cultural norms of sport is a rather different undertaking, and depends largely on who gets to call the shots. The use of human windbreaks, for example, has been a banned practice throughout much of the history of competitive running, and that ban might still be enforced if poor East Africans like Kip Keino rather than upper-class British like Roger Bannister had been the primary and most brazen rulebreakers. The use of the powerful performance-enhancing drug found naturally in coffee is now generally permitted in athletic competition, probably because a large percentage of the European and American adult population is addicted or exposed to the drug, while the use of the stimulant found naturally in khat remains banned, despite its widespread use throughout East Africa. The practice of receiving money for performance was largely banned up until about twenty-five years ago (and still is banned in some competitive realms, such as the NCAA); that ban was based largely on the cultural norms of a rather small and affluent segment of the western European sporting community. Someone earlier in this thread parodied the idea of banning altitude tents by comparing their use to such permissible performance-enhancing practices such as running 100-mile weeks, but if you go back into the literature on "doping" bans as recently as the 1960s, you can find serious discussions about banning the practice of running long distances in training in order to "burn off" flesh as a way of achieving "unfair" weight advantages in competitive marathoning.
So what's the bottom line on altitude tents? As I said earlier, the most substantial reason that I have seen for NOT banning them, apart from a background presumption against prohibitions, is that such a ban might be rather difficult to enforce, although not more difficult to enforce than many other bans that have been in place over the years. If they are not banned, my guess is that the main reason will be that the parts of the sporting community that have a vested interest in using them -- especially, collections of athletes, coaches, sponsors, manufacturers, and organizations in wealthy countries -- are highly influential in determining what is permitted and what is banned. But this latest performance by Ritz, which I initially greeted with great enthusiasm, has caused me to look further into this issue, and has made me less enthusiastic about what I would prefer to see as a breakthrough performance by an outstanding and somewhat snakebitten athlete. Based on what I know of physiology, as well as what I have recently found out about who else has been using altitude tents during the past eight to ten years, I am confident that, if I were still competing seriously, I would have long ago invested a few thousand dollars in an altitude tent, and I would probably regard it as an indispensable part of my race preparation. I'm not sure that's a good thing.