Rio Olympians Simone Biles, Venus Williams speak out against medical data hack

Simone Biles, Venus Williams and Elena Delle Donne are just a few of the Olympians speaking out against an attack by a Russian cyberespionage group on the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) that led to a public leak of their sensitive medical data.

WADA confirmed the attack, saying in a statement that the hackers, known as Tsar Team or Fancy Bear, accessed WADA’s Anti-Doping Administration and Management System (ADAMS) database through a spear phishing attack on email accounts. The database included medical data for athletes participating in the Rio 2016 Games.

“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,” Olivier Niggli, the director general for WADA, said in the statement. “We are reaching out to stakeholders ... regarding the specific athletes impacted.”

Gymnast Simone Biles, who won four gold medals in Rio, was one of the athletes affected by the hack. Information released on the 19-year-old athlete included that she was approved for a therapeutic-use exemption for certain drugs, according to an announcement tweeted by USA Gymnastics.

Taking to her own Twitter account, Biles wrote that she has taken medications for Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder since a young age, and that she believes in a clean sport and has “always followed the rules, and will continue to do so as fair play is critical to sport.”

More information also may be forthcoming from the attackers, according to WADA.

Tennis star Venus Williams also released a statement on the attack. Like Biles, she was granted a therapeutic-use exemption, and says she is “one of the strongest supporters of maintaining the highest level of integrity in competitive sport and I have been highly disciplined in following the guidelines,” according to the Washington Post.

Basketball player Elena Delle Donne, on Twitter, posted a photo of her in the hospital after thumb surgery with a “side note” on the attack in which she thanks the hackers “for making the world aware that I legally take a prescription for a condition I’ve been diagnosed with, which WADA granted me an exemption for.”

The International Olympic Committee released a statement on the hack to Newsweek, condemning “such methods which clearly aim at tarnishing the reputation of clean athletes. The IOC can confirm, however, that the athletes mentioned did not violate any anti-doping rules during the Olympic Games Rio 2016.”