The Paradox of Doping in Mountain Climbing

We’re usually comfortable deciding whether or not an athlete is doping. Lance Armstrong was definitely doping by using erythropoietin. Tennis player Novak Djokovic, on the other hand, was definitely not doping when he slept in an egg-shaped barometric chamber.

We tell one from the other by a kind of cultural gestalt, sorting out those who dope and those who don’t. Then we take that one step farther and reason: Those who don’t, compete cleanly—those that do, cheat.

But what if a substance is both performance-enhancing and a benefit to an athlete’s health? What if that substance is oxygen?

The top of Everest is in what the Swiss alpinist Edouard Wyss-Dunant nicknamed the “death zone,” meaning altitudes exceeding 26,000 feet. One of 14 mountains on Earth that have summits this high, Everest wreaks havoc on the human body. Early symptoms of altitude’s effects include dizziness, sluggishness, nausea, and fainting. If symptoms are left untreated, they quickly cascade, with increasingly dire consequences to climbers as air is choked out of their bodies. Even below the death zone, altitude can have serious repercussions.

The best way to mitigate the risk of high altitude climbing is to increase the amount of oxygen in a climber’s blood. Climbers