The Articles dealing with the imposition of sanctions, and the annotations to the Code relevant to those Articles, have received the most attention from national tribunals and CAS. This focus on the possible elimination or reduction of the period of ineligibility laid down by the Code is a natural consequence of a system where the underlying principle is that an athlete will be strictly liable without proof of an intention to cheat, or negligence, or fault, where a prohibited substance or a prohibited method is detected in a bodily sample. As most anti-doping allegations brought under the Code involve violations under Article 2.1, athletes have sought to rely on the provisions providing for the elimination or reduction of the standard period of ineligibility fairly regularly. As has been explained, the scope of any discretion to reduce a fixed sanction by CAS was a matter of uncertainty and of difference between various CAS Panels before the Code. The Code sought to introduce harmony in this important area, by providing for a relatively simple sanctions regime which provided for fixed periods of ineligibility, and contained no provisions for such penalties as fines and suspended periods of ineligibility which were present in many earlier anti-doping regimes.

Articles 9 and 10 of the Code provide for a regime of sanctions in a manner which is consistent with the Code's central aim of harmonising sanctions across all sports. However, in order to provide for an element of flexibility and proportionality in the system of penalties, the Code has, since its first version in 2003, contained provisions relating to sanctions which allow an athlete to establish exceptional circumstances as grounds either to eliminate or to reduce the standard fixed period of ineligibility. The current Code has increased the circumstances in which the standard period of ineligibility for a doping violation under Articles 2.1 and 2.2 may be reduced principally by increasing the circumstances in which Article 10.4 may be applied.