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it is perfectly reasonable to consider non-performance-enhancing asthma medication a suitable adjustment
All asthma medication is performance enhancing. If it wasn't, I'd be round to my doctor tomorrow to get some that was. If the drugs which are currently permitted were banned, pretty much anybody who uses them to compete at a high level could continue to compete if they so chose, they would just be doing so at a much lower level. Not taking your asthma drugs while exercising if you have exercise induced asthma is bad for your long term health, but then so is training for and competing in elite level sport so that's no excuse.
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
No, it's like saying that people who can't pass a lorry driving test can't be lorry drivers. In the case of lorry driving, the test is based on safety, and some diseases rule a person out of doing the job.
Obviously, I disagree profoundly with the imposition of "equalities" burdens on private enterprises, but sport is categorically different from an offer to provide goods, services or employment. In elite sport, the test is whether you can go fast (or high or far) enough without artificial assistance, the definition of "artificial" and "assistance" being somewhat arbitrary ones agreed among the competitors. It would be possible to ban the artificial assistance of variable gears in Le Tour (as Henri Desgrange wanted), and the winner would probably be different. It would be possible to ban the artificial assistance of shoes in running races. There is no duty on sport to have reasonable rules, so the reasonableness test is moot. Sport is not a public accommodation or an employment, it is an agreement among people to engage in a pointless contest based on mutually agreed rules of conduct and means of deciding the result.
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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.