-
He did say that he thinks people who have considerable difficulty breathing ("schwer atmen") don't belong into the 'pool' of athletes competing in mainstream elite sport. This is what I think is discriminatory.
It's not discriminatory, it's a defensible alternative view to the current WADA guesswork over what level of performance enhancement is "levelling the playing field" and what is turning cripples into superhumans. You wouldn't want running races to be open to people who can't walk without the assistance of a powered exoskeleton. Once you accept that, the drawing of a boundary becomes a matter of fairly arbitrary morality. Whether somebody who uses as much product as Kittel does is the best spokesman for natural performance is a separate issue :)
gbj_tester-
I'm talking about the methodology behind the Equality Act, and before it the Disability Discrimination Acts. There is no 'fairly arbitrary morality' in those, but a standard of reasonableness. This leaves a level of interpretability, of course, but in practice it works well.
A common reaction when people are told they should make reasonable adjustments is that they worry these will be completely excessive, and they will say things like 'but we couldn't put a lift in here'. Well, no, it may not be reasonable to do this, but a wheeling ramp some steps up to the entrance might well be. Likewise, the 'powered exoskeleton' clearly fails the test of reasonableness (and will continue to do so, and will only have a place when powered exoskeleton racing is taken up by many as a sport, which may well happen, but as a kind of motor sport).
Disability legislation aims at inclusive access, e.g. to sport, and that most certainly should include elite sport. There are disabled riders who ride at amateur level all the time, e.g. Paralympian Christian Haettich, who has only one arm and one leg.
Take a potential case in cycling analogous to Oscar Pistorius (pre-murder): It's perfectly conceivable that a lower leg amputee could be fast enough to be an elite pro. In that case, their prosthesis/es should be considered a reasonable adjustment for disability.
Likewise, it is perfectly reasonable to consider non-performance-enhancing asthma medication a suitable adjustment. I completely understand that when the medication has to be steroids that there's a problem. However, ruling out asthmatics from non-Paralympic elite cycling with this kind of broad brush approach is discrimination. It's like saying that wheelchair users can't be lorry drivers. One of the hardest things to achieve for disabled people is that things are considered reasonably on a case-by-case basis.
Oliver Schick
I should have looked on Tw*tter first. The correction seems mainly aimed at saying that he didn't mention the name Wiggins. He did say that he thinks people who have considerable difficulty breathing ("schwer atmen") don't belong into the 'pool' of athletes competing in mainstream elite sport. This is what I think is discriminatory.
Again, I don't really understand the drugs side, and I'm sure that not all asthma sufferers could claim that the adjustment they would require to compete in elite sport was reasonable, but I'm sure a number of them could.
Hm, this image doesn't seem to want to be hotlinked to, so here's the link:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CuvFuXPWIAAyRNh.jpg