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Children see 'horrific' content after online swimming workout hacked

Sam Goodwin
·Sports Editor
·3-min read
A previous online workout with the Scottish swim team, pictured here on Zoom.
A previous Zoom session with the Scottish swim team. Image: Twitter

Scottish Swimming has called in police to investigate the ‘horrific’ and ‘disturbing’ hacking of a public online workout with athletes.

Scottish Swimming had organised the virtual session on popular app Zoom in a way for the public to connect with their favourite stars.

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However the live stream, which was reportedly being watched by a number of children, was ‘compromised with abusive content’ from an unknown third party.

“Scottish Swimming sincerely apologises for the incident that happened during an organised Zoom event, where the aquatics community were invited to work out alongside our performance athletes,” the organisation said in a statement.

“At the end of last week we shared information about the workout across our social media platforms, asking those interested in participating to log into a link that was shared publicly this morning.

“Unfortunately the link was ‘Zoom-bombed’ with disturbing content shared with circa 300 people that had signed in to the event.

“The video was immediately shut down and the incident referred to the police and their cyber-crime unit. We apologise to everyone involved and deeply regret the outcome of today’s event.

“Scottish Swimming will continue to support and engage with our aquatic community during this time in isolation and have started a full review of the process undertaken today along with consideration of security measures across all platforms, in order to put in place measures to prevent any further incidents of this nature happening again.

“At a time when the aquatics community was pulling together and supporting one another so positively, it is very upsetting to have a minority cause upset and distress during the lockdown.”

Duncan Scott, pictured here in action at the Commonwealth Games in 2018.
Duncan Scott in action at the Commonwealth Games in 2018. (Photo by Clive Rose/Getty Images)

Scottish swimmers left fuming

Scottish swimmer Duncan Scott, who infamously got into an altercation with Sun Yang at the 2019 world championships, wrote on Twitter: “I am in disgust. Our open invite WOD cancelled due to a sick individual.

“I am sorry for what everyone and more importantly what the kids that were apart of the WOD had to see!!”

Fellow Olympic medallist Aimee Wilmott wrote: “Sorry to everyone involved! There are some awful people in the world, who do some disturbing things, who ruined what was set to be a fun workout!”