Beware of the Fancy Bears in Russian doping scandal – Athletes’ representative says anti-doping system ‘not broken’

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PARIS, Oct 5, (AP): Somewhere in Russia, computer hackers must be congratulating themselves on a well-executed con.

By stealing and then publishing the private medical files of more than 120 international athletes from a World Anti-Doping Agency database, the self-described “Fancy Bears hack team” has diverted attention from Russia’s systemic abuse of banned performance-enhancing drugs in sport, the biggest doping scandal since East German officials fed powerful steroids to teenagers during the Cold War.

The hackers’ tactic, used by tricksters everywhere, of waving one hand so people forget what the other is doing, has worked spectacularly. In July and August, sport was focused on how to punish Russia for a government-sanctioned program of doping and deception detailed by successive WADA probes. Russian track and field athletes, with one exception, missed the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro as a result, and Russia was banned outright from the Paralympic Games.

But now, in part because of the hackers’ mischief-making, the spotlight has shifted to non-Russian athletes whose data was stolen and onto WADA itself, left red-faced by the electronic intrusion.

Instead of focusing single-mindedly on how to wean Russia off its cheating addiction and protect Russian youngsters from being strong-armed into regimens of needles and pills, sport has been fed a red herring, sucked into debate about whether the global anti-doping system is fit for purpose. Olympic leaders meet this Saturday to discuss WADA’s future.

If they listen carefully, perhaps they’ll hear bears in the background, chuckling.

The hackers must not have the last laugh. It’s time to call time on their scam.

For starters, the stolen info they’ve published is not, as they claim on their website, “sensational proof” that non-Russian athletes have been doping with WADA’s backing. Quite the opposite: It’s proof that sport has a system in place that allows athletes, like the rest of us, to take medicines we need.

Take, for example, Kathleen Baker, who won a relay gold medal and individual silver in Rio. The American swimmer has Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammation of the digestive tract that causes persistent diarrhea, bleeding, weight loss, cramps and other symptoms.

Swimming’s governing body granted Baker medical waivers to take anti-inflammatory steroids that normally would be banned for athletes in competition. Her waivers were among more than 200 stolen and published by the Fancy Bears. Others got waivers to treat asthma, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and other recognized medical conditions. Several have waivers allowing them to carry emergency syringes of adrenaline, a stimulant banned for athletes in competition but which can be life-saving for sufferers of severe allergic reactions.

Such people “really have to have adrenaline handy; if you don’t you can die,” Ken Fitch, an Australian sports doctor with long experience of the waiver system, said in an interview.

Such exemptions, in short, bear zero relation to the elaborate, hard-core doping schemes that operated in Russia, since exposed by two WADA-commissioned investigations, with designer cocktails of banned steroids, dirty athletes’ drug-test samples made to disappear and replaced with supposedly clean ones, and the Russian FSB security agency part of the plot, seemingly finding a way to pop open what were meant to be tamper-proof sample bottles.

Meanwhile, the head of WADA’s athlete commission says the global anti-doping system is not “broken” and laments that politics has brought “discord” to the fight against performance-enhancing drugs.

Beckie Scott, chair of the World Anti-Doping Agency athlete committee, says all sides must worth together to deal with “an undeniable threat to the integrity of sport today.”

In an op-ed released Wednesday, the former Olympic cross-country skier from Canada notes that WADA “has come under intense criticism and scrutiny” in the wake of the Russian doping scandal.

Scott says “almost every day someone new from the Olympic family takes to the media with the critical claim that the global anti-doping ‘system is broken.’”

She adds: “To be clear, ‘the system’ is not broken. If it were, the exposure of systematic and state-controlled doping in Russia by WADA would never have happened.”

 

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