British Olympic runner Mo Farah is among 26 new athletes from 10 countries to have their medical records published online by the Russian hackers known as the Fancy Bears.
The personal information, which relates to therapeutic use exemptions (TUEs) the athletes were granted so they could take medicine that would otherwise be banned, was stolen from the World Anti-Doping Agency’s data storage system.
As well as the 33-year-old Farah, who completed a second straight 5,000-10,000 metres double at the Rio Olympics last month, the Fancy Bears have posted the TUEs given to Spanish tennis great Rafa Nadal and Britain's Olympic golf champion Justin Rose.
Alongside Farah and Rose, the other Team GB members in this fourth batch of hacked data are hockey's Alex Danson, Crista Cullen and Samantha Quek, rowers Helen Glover and Peter Reed, and track cyclist Callum Skinner.
A total of 66 athletes have now had their TUEs leaked online, 17 of them British.
Rose’s TUE is for an anti-inflammatory drug he took to treat a back injury that caused him to miss several weeks of action in May and June, while almost all the other British TUEs are for fairly routine asthma and allergy prescriptions.
But just as Bradley Wiggins now faces questions about his past use of drugs that are normally banned under WADA's rules, Farah will have to explain the first of his two TUEs as he has previously acknowledged only one.
That TUE was issued in 2014 after he collapsed his apartment in Park City, Utah, where he had been training at altitude. It was initially feared he may have suffered a heart attack but he was eventually treated for dehydration, fatigue and a blow to head with saline and pain-killers.
Farah, a five-time world champion, discussed this TUE application, which was authorised by the International Association of Athletics Federations and approved by WADA, last year when he faced questions about his coach Alberto Salazar, who remains under investigation by the United States Anti-Doping Agency.
Like Wiggins, there is no suggestion Farah has broken any of sport’s anti-doping rules but his failure to recall taking a large injection of the powerful corticosteroid triamcinolone in 2008 — the same drug Wiggins used in 2011, 2012 and 2013 — will raise fresh questions.
Farah was given permission for a single intra-articular (soft tissue around a joint) injection of 80 milligrams, the maximum dose typically prescribed, on October 1, two months after his failure to reach the 5,000m final at the Beijing Olympics but two months before his second-place finish at the European Cross Country Championships.
The US-based Londoner is also known to have used asthma inhalers since childhood, although those do not require any special permission under sport’s anti-doping rules.
