A Russian group has hacked the World Anti-Doping Agency’s athlete database and revealed private medical information for some of America’s top athletes, falsely claiming to find incriminating evidence of doping.
The group pointed to U.S. tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams, basketball star Elena Delle Donne, and Olympic gymnastics gold medalist Simone Biles as having tested positive for banned substances. What they failed to mention is that all of these athletes had been granted exemptions to take those various drugs for medical reasons.
After the hack, Biles acknowledge that she has had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder since she was younger. The hackers revealed that she had tested positive for Ritalin, a typical treatment for ADHD.
The data was believed to have been accessed via spear-phishing of email accounts, WADA said in a news release, and Fancy Bear was threatening to reveal more such information about “the U.S. Olympic team and their dirty methods to win.”
“This is just the tip of the iceberg. Today’s sport is truly contaminated while the world is unaware of a large number of American doping athletes,” the group wrote on its website.
“WADA deeply regrets this situation and is very conscious of the threat that it represents to athletes whose confidential information has been divulged through this criminal act,” said Olivier Niggli, the director general of WADA. “WADA condemns these ongoing cyber-attacks that are being carried out in an attempt to undermine WADA and the global anti-doping system. WADA has been informed by law enforcement authorities that these attacks are originating out of Russia.”
Niggli also cited in its response his group’s McLaren Investigation Report, which was released in May and found that Russia had engaged in a systematic Olympic doping regimen.
“Let it be known that these criminal acts are greatly compromising the effort by the global anti-doping community to re-establish trust in Russia further to the outcomes of the Agency’s independent McLaren Investigation Report,” he said.
As the New York Times reported, the incident comes shortly after the hacking of a Russian athlete who had fled the country to become a whistleblower about Russia’s doping program:
This week’s hack came in the wake of revelations that the WADA account of another Russian whistle-blower—Yuliya Stepanova, a middle-distance runner who fled the country and is now living in an undisclosed location in the United States—was hacked.
Ms. Stepanova said last month that she feared for her safety, and that she and her husband—a former employee of Russia’s antidoping agency—had moved to a new address as a result.
The whistleblower at the center of the McLaren Report, Grigory Rodchenkov, was the head of Russia’s anti-doping lab and detailed a program of switching out about 100 urine samples for dozens of athletes and at least 15 Olympic medal winners over the course of the 2014 Games in Sochi, Russia.
Update, Sept. 13, 2016, at 5:30 p.m.: Venus Williams released the following statement.
