Preparticipation screening for unsuspected cardiovascular disease is a controversial topic in the medical and lay communities. Much attention has been directed towards young competitive athletes, particularly the proposed strategy of incorporating 12-lead electrocardiograms into the screening process, even on a national or worldwide basis. However, sudden deaths of young athletes owing to genetic or congenital heart diseases have a low incidence in the general population. Furthermore, young people not engaged in competitive sports can harbour the same conditions that cause sudden death in athletes, which has gone largely unrecognized. Notably, sudden deaths from these diseases are numerically far more common in the much larger population of nonathletes. In this Perspectives article, we propose that an ethical dilemma has emerged, raising the important public-health issue of whether young individuals should be arbitrarily excluded from potentially life-saving clinical screening evaluations because they do not engage in competitive sports programmes.