When it comes to doping, the world of professional sports is still a wild and woolly place. Professional cycling alone probably creates enough demand to keep one or two needle manufacturers in business.

Recent lowlights include American Tyler Hamilton, a gold medal winner in the Athens Olympics who’s been suspended for shooting up with someone else’s blood, and a whole bunch of entrants in this year’s Tour de France who were implicated in a Spanish doping scandal. Now it looks like the Tour winner, Floyd Landis, could be dirty, too.

If the average, rational person were placed at the head of an important anti-doping organization, he’d probably respond to this sorry state by redoubling efforts to screen athletes for clearly inappropriate substances and practices like steroids and blood doping.

But the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is not the average, rational person. To WADA, now’s the perfect time to take on altitude tents! It’s a shame WADA’s leadership isn’t subjected to random testing by the World Anti-Dope Agency, an organization for which there appears to be a distinct market niche.

Such tents, which simulate low-oxygen conditions found at high altitudes, are used by lowland athletes who hope to produce more red blood cells. This benefit is akin to that of doping, but without the needles, drugs or refrigerated bags of blood. For that reason, WADA’s ethics panel recently decided that altitude tents violate “the spirit of sport,” according to The New York Times. The agency is considering a ban.

The problem with banning tents is that athletes can get the very same benefit by moving to a high-elevation area and driving to a lower altitude every day to train. Some do that already. Should WADA ban this practice, too? If not, then the agency will do little more than encourage well-off athletes to move to geographically beneficial areas. Those who can’t afford to move, meanwhile, will be denied a needle-free way of getting the same result. How a rule this anti-egalitarian could be consistent with “the spirit of sport” is beyond us.