[drdaeman]

> I'm amazed this is legal

If someone is well-informed (the key point here - but I assume professional athletes are well aware of what they're doing) and still wants to do something weird and/or dangerous to their body, without harming others in the process - who is to deny them their bodily autonomy, and on what basis?

> and that people would do it in the first place

Two words: professional sports. Those folks willingly (I hope, or that'd be insane) risk their health for money, fame, and advances of medical science. Although the entertainment industry really tries the weirdest thing that I really don't understand - trying their best to shift the focus away from the science advancement as much as possible, even though this is the only actually valuable thing in professional sports.

[MBCook]

I meant legal in the allowed by the sport’s governing body sense, not the will the cops show up at my door sense.

If this is what athletes do to get to the top of the sport, then it soon becomes a pseudo requirement. If the sport regulators don’t clamp down on it then they’re basically forcing people to do something insanely risky if they want to compete.

Plenty of professional sports have banned things for simply being too dangerous even if they do give an edge.

[plorkyeran]

It is almost certainly just something that hasn't been banned yet. There's a very long list of similar things which the UCI has banned, but they generally don't ban things which people might hypothetically do but haven't actually started doing yet, so each time someone comes up with a new idea there's a window of time to do it while it's still legal.

[MBCook]

I expect you’re right. It has to get on the radar to be banned.

To make matters worse unlike PEDs this may be very hard to catch.

It just floors me that someone who knew about the similarity between high altitude and partial CO poisoning not only decided to try it but got others to go along.