The marquee event of the men’s Alpine Olympic program at the Beijing Winter Games was postponed Sunday after high winds forced two hours of delays before organizers canceled it for the day.
Organizers were due to meet later Sunday to discuss when to fit the race into the program, with Monday the most likely option.
“Due to the present weather situation with the wind gust and the updated forecast — the jury together with the organizer have decided in the best interest of safety and fairness for the racers to delay today’s men’s Olympic downhill to another day,” organizers said in a statement.
Monday’s scheduled event is the women’s giant slalom, which will be held on the technical course adjacent to ‘The Rock’ speed course.
Similar wind in the upper and middle areas of the course had led to the cancellation of Saturday’s third training session after just three skiers had completed their run.
While no fans were able to attend the race, International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach had arrived at the course, which is made from artificial snow, to watch the event.
Norway’s Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, the favorite in the event, backed the decision but said skiers might have to cope with some degree of wind.
“We will see, we just have to be patient and make sure that we make the right decisions,” said the World Cup downhill leader.
“If we talk about our safety then we can’t do much about it. But if it is only just a little bit, so it is safe to ski, then we might just have to race with wind and take what we get.
“It is an outside sport, and we know about the wind and the things that can happen,” added Kilde, who hopes there will be less waiting around if a similar situation emerges.
“It is just a lot of lack of energy when you have to prepare for such a long day and then suddenly at 2 p.m. they have to make a decision. Let’s see if they can make a decision earlier in the future and hope for the best.”
French veteran Johan Clarey backed the decision. “I think the conditions were not safe for everyone, so security first,” said the 41-year-old.
It’s a key part of President Joe Biden’s plans to fight major ransomware attacks and digital espionage campaigns: creating a board of experts that would investigate major incidents to see what went wrong and try to prevent the problems from happening again — much like a transportation safety board does with plane crashes.
But eight months after Biden signed an executive order creating the Cyber Safety Review Board it still hasn’t been set up. That means critical tasks haven’t been completed, including an investigation of the massive SolarWinds espionage campaign first discovered more than a year ago. Russian hackers stole data from several federal agencies and private companies.
Some supporters of the new board say the delay could hurt national security and comes amid growing concerns of a potential conflict with Russia over Ukraine that could involve nation-state cyberattacks. The FBI and other federal agencies recently released an advisory — aimed particularly at critical infrastructure like utilities — on Russian state hackers’ methods and techniques.
“We will never get ahead of these threats if it takes us nearly a year to simply organize a group to investigate major breaches like SolarWinds,” said Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Such a delay is detrimental to our national security and I urge the administration to expedite its process.”
Biden’s order, signed in May, gives the board 90 days to investigate the SolarWinds hack once it’s established. But there’s no timeline for creating the board itself, a job designated to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
In response to questions from The Associated Press, DHS said in a statement it was far along in setting it up and anticipated a “near-term announcement,” but did not address why the process has taken so long.
Scott Shackelford, the cybersecurity program chair at Indiana University and an advocate for creating a cyber review board, said having a rigorous study about what happened in a past hack like SolarWinds is a way of helping prevent similar attacks.
“It sure is taking, my goodness, quite a while to get it going,” Shackelford said. “It’s certainly past time where we could see some positive benefits from having it stood up.”
The Biden administration has made improving cybersecurity a top priority and taken steps to bolster defenses, but this is not the first time lawmakers have been unhappy with the pace of progress. Last year several lawmakers complained it took the administration too long to name a national cyber director, a new position created by Congress.
The SolarWinds hack exploited vulnerabilities in the software supply-chain system and went undetected for most of 2020 despite compromises at a broad swath of federal agencies and dozens of companies, primarily telecommunications and information technology providers. The hacking campaign is named SolarWinds after the U.S. software company whose product was exploited in the first-stage infection of that effort.
The hack highlighted the Russians’ skill at getting to high-level targets. The AP previously reported that SolarWinds hackers had gained access to emails belonging to the then-acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf.
The Biden administration has kept many of the details about the cyberespionage campaign hidden.
The Justice Department, for instance, said in July that 27 U.S. attorney offices around the country had at least one employee’s email account compromised during the hacking campaign. It did not provide details about what kind of information was taken and what impact such a hack may have had on ongoing cases.
The New York-based staff of the DOJ Antitrust Division also had files stolen by the SolarWinds hackers, according to one former senior official briefed on the hack who was not authorized to speak about it publicly and requested anonymity. That breach has not previously been reported. The Antitrust Division investigates private companies and has access to highly sensitive corporate data.
The federal government has undertaken reviews of the SolarWinds hack. The Government Accountability Office issued a report this month on the SolarWinds hack and another major hacking incident that found there was sometimes a slow and difficult process for sharing information between government agencies and the private sector, The National Security Council also conducted a review of the SolarWinds hack last year, according to the GAO report.
But having the new board conduct an independent, thorough examination of the SolarWinds hack could identify inconspicuous security gaps and issues that others may have missed, said Christopher Hart, a former National Transportation Safety Board chairman who has advocated for the creation of a cyber review board.
“Most of the crashes that the NTSB really goes after … are ones that are a surprise even to the security experts,” Hart said. “They weren’t really obvious things, they were things that really took some deep digging to figure out what went wrong.”
