Management of allergic Olympic athletes.

Twenty percent of the recent Australian Olympic athletes have had an allergic disorder. Because of the ban on all sympathomimetic drugs except some beta 2-agonists. Olympic team physicians have a major responsibility to ensure that no competitor is disqualified for infringing on the antidoping rules of the Medical Commission of the International Olympic Committee. Inadvertent contravention of these regulations may occur because numerous banned sympathomimetics are available to athletes and their coaches without medical prescription and are frequently contained in combination preparations. The unbroken 24 yr in which asthmatics have won Olympic medals have been both before and after the introduction of drug tests. Currently a comprehensive range of preventive and therapeutic medications are available for asthmatics to compete with minimal respiratory disadvantage. It was, however, during a period of unnecessary restriction that an American swimmer forfeited his gold medal because of prerace ingestion of a banned sympathomimetic agent. Should adverse air quality be encountered during the Los Angeles Olympics, allergic competitors will be among the most inconvenienced . Athletes with allergic rhinitis and sinusitis will be the most disadvantaged because sympathomimetic vasoconstrictors remain banned. It is strongly recommended that the Medical Commission of the International Olympic Committee meet with an appropriate body of experts (i.e., the American Academy of Allergy and Immunology) to review this ban on vasoconstrictor agents.