© Lucy Nicholson / ReutersAllyson Felix
Armed with athlete medical records furnished by the Fancy Bear hacking group, Germany's
Der Spiegel magazine has revealed a number of "questionable" medical practices, and blatant legal loopholes athletes use to defeat existing anti-doping regulations.
The nuanced 4,000-word
investigation shows that authorities are a step behind in combating every means of doping - whether it is keeping up with the latest illegal substances, tracking down the competitors' whereabouts out of season, or bringing a case against athletes the regulators suspect to be cheating, but whose guilt they cannot prove definitively.
But a large section is dedicated to athletes taking advantage of the system, without explicitly breaking the rules. The research is based "Declaration of Use" (DOU) forms regularly submitted by international athletes, in which they indicate substances they have taken over the previous week, which have been handed over by Fancy Bear.
"
[Der] Spiegel is in possession of the DOU forms submitted by dozens of American athletes, including cyclists, soccer players and track-and-field athletes. They show that in the run up to Rio, athletes took pretty much everything that was available on the legal market," write the authors of the piece, which has four bylines. "There are weightlifters who take milk protein to build up their muscles, tennis players who use acylcarnitine to improve their concentration and triathletes who swear by fish oil, for no discernible reason. Some DOUs are rather questionable."
Comment: Finally, a mainstream report on the actual content of the Fancy Bear leaks and not the usual gibberish over the question of whether or not the hackers were 'Russian'.
So there you have it; everyone is systematically 'cheating'.
See also: Hacking group Fancy Bears releases emails claiming cover-up of US athletes' drug tests