China accused of stealing brain data from athletes including Charles Leclerc
Charles Leclerc named in report that claims he is among top athletes who may have had brain data stolen.
A bombshell report claims a Chinese-backed tech firm may have harvested brain data from top athletes, including Ferrari F1 driver Charles Leclerc.
Leclerc was named in an investigation carried out over a six-month period by Hunterbrook Media and journalist Pablo Torre alleging that brainwave data from a focus-training headband could be being accessed by China.
According to documents obtained by Hunterbrook Media, BrainCo - a neurotechnology company - has been funded by entities linked to the ruling Chinese Communist Party and partnered with Chinese military contractors.
BrainCo is accused of harvesting neural data from top athletes from the world of sport, including tennis star Jannik Sinner, American skier Mikaela Shiffrin, as well as Premier League footballers.
"I want to establish that this headband that I was just wearing, called the FocusCalm, is not just like a random thing,” Torre said on his podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out.
“It is actually incredibly popular in the world of sports because it enables athletes to track their brainwaves for performance reasons. You can see when you're calm, when you're stressed, 'you can get in the zone' is what the whole advertising around this is.
"These aren't just like any athletes: we're talking about Italy's famously focused Jannik Sinner, who trains with the FocusCalm. We're talking about the former number one women's tennis player in the world, Iga Swiatek, who is using it every day.
“The number one alpine skier of all time, American gold medalist Mikaela Shiffrin, who uses it as also a bunch of English Premier League soccer players do.”
Is it possible for China to access brain data?
Dr Riccardo Ceccarelli, a leading sports physician and founder of Formula Medicine, claimed it is a possibility that China could be using the data to train its own athletes.
“Yes, absolutely. Yes,” he said. “We are still in contact with them now because they did also a device which is more wearable and that we can use in different experiment with aviation, with the military, because obviously the device has to be wearable and comfortable.
“So it is a synergy, is a project that is running since many years and obviously BrainCo was really, really supporting us.”
Ceccarelli has worked with Leclerc since the Monegasque driver was just 13.
Meanwhile, professor Nita Farahany warned this data could be used for military research.
“For the skeptics out there I think it is very likely that the CCP is using brain data to try to better understand how our athletes perform to better train for future soldiers, to become part of an overall programme that they’ve been developing around cognitive warfare,” she said.
The full investigation report can be read here.
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