Don’t worry New Zealand, despite what you may have heard Valerie Adams wasn’t beaten to Olympic gold by a drug cheat (this time, anyway). That won’t stop the idiocy from spreading, as people get suckered in by the clickbait headlines, but there’s actually nothing be upset about here. Well, apart from the bigger picture that is, but we’ll come around to that.

What happened was that Michelle Carter, Rio gold medallist in shot put, had her medical records from the WADA database hacked and in them it was revealed that she’d twice applied for substance exemptions and had been granted one of them. The applications were identical, one made in January 2015 (the rejected one) and the other filed… ah, it doesn’t really say. But presumably sometime after January 2015 would make logical sense.

The stuffs that Carter received her Therapeutic Use Exemptions (TUE) for were a pair of glucocorticoids, one to be taken orally as needed and another intramuscularly once a day, as well as a daily dosage of a form of beta-2 agonists. What does that particular arrangement of letters (and a number) mean in real life speak? It’s asthma medication. Something found in her inhaler.

As for the glucocorticoids, those are only banned in-competition and in Carter’s case the specific stuff she asked to use is generally for treating inflammatory disease. Probably muscle soreness. Literally nothing to freak out about there – and it’s worth mentioning that WADA only allow TUE’s once the athletes have taken a medical that confirms they have legitimate reasons for what they’re asking for. They’re not handing out drugs for free and they’d never allow something that wasn’t a reasonable request. This is what their job, as the World Anti-Doping Agency, is. They decide what’s banned and what ain’t and it’s the same for everyone.

As to what effect this all had on her performance where Michelle Carter threw a personal best of 20.63m in the final round of competition to win the gold, you’d have to ask a doctor. But safe to say she might have had more trouble competing if she wasn’t allowed her asthma medication – is that an unfair advantage?

For the record, Queen Val said at the time that she had no suspicions.

Valerie Adams: "I don't think so. I mean hand on my heart I think this is a pretty legit competition."

Drug Free Sport NZ, speaking to the NZ Herald, said the same in the wake of this release.

DFNZ: "The only people who should feel aggrieved are the ones who have been named on this list. This is their private medical information and should never have ended up in the public domain.”

Of course, those quotes came at the end of the article and it wasn’t until the last little bit of the fifth paragraph that they specified that Carter had done nothing wrong. And the Herald covered this thing more fairly than the rest of them. Just look at these headlines and wonder what they’re trying to get at with them:

NZ Herald - Adams' Rio rival granted drug exemption
Stuff - Shot put gold medallist Michelle Carter had exemption to use drugs
RNZ - Olympic gold medallist allowed to use banned drugs
Newstalk ZB - Adams' rival's drug exemption makes playing field uneven

Ignore the ZB one because that was a silly opinion piece. But take note that they all make use of that frightening buzzword: ‘drugs’. Uh-oh, drugs in sport again. Another New Zealander cheated by those corrupt major nations. Let’s all get outraged… at least until you click on the link and realise there’s nothing to the story in the first place. Hey but by then you’ve already been exposed to a couple of ads and upped the site’s page views ever so slightly so all goods.

On that subject, here’s an ad. Please click on it if it interests you. Hooray.

The balance between monetised web traffic and journalistic integrity is a continual debate and high on the list of topics therein is the way that headlines are written deliberately to encourage clicks rather than to reflect the article they belong to. Even just by the use of inflammatory language.

Which isn’t to say that there isn’t a story worth telling hidden beneath the fluff. There absolutely is. But the angle that matters is that a group of Russian hackers that stylise themselves as vigilantes for “fair play and clean sport” hacked into and exposed private medical information. They’re called ‘Fancy Bear’ and their website is flanked by a couple of gifs of cute stomping grizzlies dressed up as cops. They’ve managed to, erm, ‘gain access’ to WADA’s records and cast them out into the internet for all to see and flip out about. No New Zealanders had their medical records hacked but several big name athletes from around the world did.

The general belief is that these leaks are in retaliation to the Russian doping ban at the Rio Games, with the intention being to show how the Russians were scapegoated. Which, regardless of how bad the evidence may or may not have been, they undeniably were. They were scapegoated because they got caught. Nobody should assume that the Russians were the only ones running such an illicit programme.

But did any of these leaks reflect any actual cheating? No, not really. Just more TUE’s for the most part. But they do put a fair bit of egg on the faces of people like Bradley Wiggins who it’s revealed has had several exemptions despite never admitting it before and even going as far as professing a fear of needles. There’s no doubt that there are people out there abusing legal doping and that sparks another genuine debate about where exactly the line is between right and wrong, who gets to decide it and how this all is dealt with.

Want a good solution for TUEs? Make it compulsory to publicly disclose all TUEs. Any athlete would think twice unless they really needed it.
— Jonathan Vaughters (@Vaughters) September 18, 2016

Ahhh but we’ll get right back to that debate as soon as we’re finished this fascinating piece about the Top Ten Sexiest Cats of Current All Blacks.