IN releasing private medical information about dozens of Olympians over the past week, the Fancy Bears hack team has sought to reveal “dirty methods” by which athletes — specifically Americans — win their medals.

    But Fancy Bears, which the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has said is a Russian cyber espionage group, has likely fallen short of that goal, experts agreed. Rather, the hackers have exposed other cracks in the anti-doping system — namely a lack of transparency around therapeutic use exemptions (TUEs) and concerns about WADA’s ability to protect athletes’ information.

    Those concerns come at a fraught time for anti-doping, as the last year has also included two investigations that revealed widespread and state-sponsored doping in Russia. Investigators found tampering during the 2014 Sochi Olympics, compliance issues in several laboratories around the world and a lack of consensus between WADA and the International Olympic Committee as to how the system should be reformed.

    “It’s the sort of thing where yeah, if the Fancy Bears’ target was to create a scandal around American athletes, probably it missed because there’s nothing really too exciting there,” said Roger Pielke Jr., a professor in the sports governance program at the University of Colorado.

    “Maybe ironically, the Fancy Bears have hit another target, which is to show that the same flaws in anti-doping oversight that led to the Sochi lab and so on show up here as well in the protection of athletes’ data, lack of transparency. It kind of reinforces the problems surrounding the whole Russian episode.”

    Fancy Bears released its fourth dump of data taken from the WADA database Monday, bringing its total to records on 66 athletes from 15 countries. The United States and Britain account for 35 athletes on the list.

    Many of the records are for therapeutic use exemptions, which athletes can get to allow them to take a substance on the banned list.

    But it’s not always an easy process to get one. Athletes must provide medical justification from a doctor, and that information is reviewed by a TUE committee that either accepts or rejects the application.

    Those TUEs are time-limited, meaning an athlete might take a medication during the course of an illness or injury or be granted a longer TUE for a chronic condition.

    Fancy Bears’ site says it views these documents as “licenses for doping” granted by WADA, which it sees as corrupt.

    (SD-Agencies)