THE athletics season concludes tonight with the Diamond League finals in Brussels but this will not impede the doping debate that has dominated this season. The latest twist in the tale is the statement of denial of any wrongdoing by marathon world record holder, Paula Radcliffe, following, she said, being “effectively implicated” this week by a parliamentary select committee in recent doping allegations within her sport. Jesse Norman MP suggested that London Marathon winners and medallists and "potentially, British athletes" were under suspicion. While Radcliffe was never named, she deemed this to be so obviously directed at her that she felt compelled to issue a statement refuting the allegations.

There is not a shred of concrete evidence of any wrongdoing by Radcliffe but she recorded three “abnormal” blood values which have fuelled the rumours of doping. She did not want her name and her blood-data in the public domain but felt that the events at the parliamentary inquiry left her with no choice but to speak out.

It has been an interesting summer with regards to doping in athletics; last month, eight British athletes, including Mo Farah, published their blood-data in an attempt to promote transparency and prove they were clean. And so the debate was sparked; should it be compulsory for athletes to follow suit and publish their own data? The views of athletes were mixed; some thought it to be a good idea and the best way to clean up the sport while others, most notably Radcliffe, argued that athletes publishing their data was not a good idea. “The key point is you can’t prove you are clean,” she said. “What the World Anti-Doping Agency are trying to say is we don’t want this data in the public domain because people don’t understand it, it is very complicated. Something like the blood passport has taken a long time to get to where it can be properly interpreted by experts.”

Radcliffe was criticised on some fronts for taking this stance; if you’ve got nothing to hide then what is the problem, many asked? This is, to some extent, a valid argument and it seems likely, perhaps inevitable, that we will get to a point where athletes, whether it be voluntary or mandatory, release their blood values. Sport rarely moves backwards and now that the door has been opened to making blood values public, it seems unlikely that we will go back to a point of secrecy.

But is this fair? There seems to be an assumption, an expectation even, that elite athletes should open their lives to the world, that every movement made and every medicine and supplement taken should to be disclosed to every Tom, Dick and Harry. After all, secrets are for cheats, aren’t they?

Well, no, not always. Of course, an athlete who is taking EPO does not want their blood-data made public but there may be a plethora of other reasons as to why an athlete does not want to disclose their medical records, which is effectively what could end up happening.

Athletes’ privacy is already heavily intruded upon. The process of drug-testing itself is highly invasive; years ago, an athlete was handed a bottle and told to return it to the tester when they had produced their sample. Nowadays, an athlete is watched with hawk-like focus from the minute the tester appears. It’s a fairly humiliating process, and one that is highly unusual in any walk of life other than elite sport, but athletes have accepted that it is a necessary evil when the aim is clean sport.

Then, in 2009, the ‘Whereabouts system’ was brought into elite sport. This involves the athlete identifying where they will be for one hour a day, 365 days of the year during which the testers may turn up. On holiday? Doesn’t matter. Wedding day? Doesn’t matter. Whatever the circumstances, they must still give one hour per day. When this rule was introduced, there was a significant backlash with athletes decrying the invasion of privacy of the Whereabouts system. Athletes queued-up to denounce the new system: “Maybe in the future they will find a tag they can put on us like dogs have,” the American hurdler Lolo Jones said. Some 65 Belgian athletes even started court proceedings against the Whereabouts system, citing the European Convention on Human Rights. Whereabouts is now accepted as a necessary, if inconvenient, part of being an elite athlete.

But the releasing of blood values, and any mitigating factors that may affect the data, is another level entirely when it comes to invasion of privacy. There is the argument that transparency is required for trust to be reinstated within sport but there are illnesses, medications and conditions that an athlete may, completely legitimately, not want the world to know about. Elite athletes are afforded many privileges and for that, they must expect to concede a number of things, a degree of privacy being one of those. But it must be remembered that athletes are people, not merely commodities, and expecting them to lay their lives bare to the nth degree, is perhaps an expectation too far.