scorecard
  1. Home
  2. sports
  3. Latest Fancy Bears leak targets Olympians Mo Farah and Rafael Nadal

Latest Fancy Bears leak targets Olympians Mo Farah and Rafael Nadal

Sonam Sheth   

Latest Fancy Bears leak targets Olympians Mo Farah and Rafael Nadal
Sports2 min read

RTX2MDRZ

Thomson Reuters

Gold winner Mohamed Farah (GBR) of Britain celebrates at the 2016 Rio Olympics.

Mo Farah and Rafael Nadal are two of the latest Olympians to have confidential information leaked by the the hacker group Fancy Bears.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has blamed Russian agents for the hack, though Russian officials deny this.

The leak, released on September 19, targets a total of 26 athletes, out of which four are from the US - Ariana Washington, Brady Ellison, Connor Jaeger, and Lauren Hernandez.

The leak does not list the records of any Russian athletes, but an International Olympic Committee found evidence of state-sponsored and widespread doping in Russia's Olympic athletes, many of whom were barred from the 2016 Rio Games and the Paralympics as a result.

One of the more high profile athletes targeted by the hackers was Mo Farah.

Farah, a four-time British Olympic champion, was given permission for the therapeutic use of a corticosteroid, triamcinolone, in October 2008, and for morphine and Vicodin in July 2014, according to the leak.

He was granted permission for the morphine drip in 2014 after he collapsed during a training session, The Guardian reports.

Farah said in 2015 that he had only been granted one therapeutic use exemption (TUE) after his coach, Alberto Salazar, came under intense scrutiny for doping allegations.

Spain's Rafael Nadal, a fourteen-time grand slam singles champion, was also targeted. Fancy Bears' leak revealed that Nadal was granted two medical exemptions for steroids; betamethasone in September 2009, and Tetracosactide in July 2012.

Fancy Bears first came to light on September 13, when the group published the first batch of WADA documents, targeting high-profile athletes like Simone Biles, Venus Williams, and Serena Williams, all of whom had received medical exemptions to use drugs that are otherwise banned from competitive sports.

Since then, the group has released a new batch of information every two days. The second and third leaks, which included other high-profile names like Britain's Bradley Wiggins and Nicola Adams, were on September 15 and September 17, and the most recent one was published Monday morning.

READ MORE ARTICLES ON


Advertisement

Advertisement