The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has revoked the acquittal ordered by the Russian anti-doping authorities and has decided to sanction the Russian skater Kamila Valieva, the prodigious girl who should have been the queen of the Beijing Winter Games, with a four-year suspension. 2022.
It closes without surprises, 23 months after its birth, a case intoxicated and prolonged by the poor sporting relations of isolated Russia with the rest of the world, and with an eminently autarkic anti-doping policy, full of scandals and always suspicious.
The start of the four-year sanction has been set for December 25, 2021, the date of the positive control of the skater around whose artistic and vital adventures the Winter Games in the Chinese capital revolved, so Valieva would arrive in time to participate in the next Winter Games, those in Cortina d’Ampezzo-Milan, in February 2026.
Their presence is then a mystery, increased because all Russian athletes are banned from international competitions as punishment for the invasion of Ukraine. The last two years Valieva, an extraordinary athlete, continued competing, but only in national events.
As part of the sanction, Valieva is disqualified from all the competitions in which she participated, since the Russian championship, and loses medals, prizes and financial rewards. With this, Russia retains the gold medal in the Beijing 2022 team competition, which should go to the second place, the United States, when resolved by the Olympic Committee (IOC) and the international skating federation.
Valieva, the first figure skater to perform a quad (a quadruple jump, with four turns on itself) at the Olympic Games, was 15 years old on February 7, 2022 when she led Russia to the gold medal of the team competition. Her exercises, her jumps of tremendous athletic strength and sublime dancer’s grace, left the world with its mouth open. There was none of her like her. Her scorecards were too small to assess the difficulty of her pirouettes and the beauty with which she executed them, the perfection. The skating world had been waiting for a new queen for years. She did not find a queen, but a fairy.
On the same day, even before the medal ceremony, the international skating federation received a notification from the Stockholm anti-doping laboratory: the analysis of Valieva’s urine collected on December 25, 2021 after the Russian national championship in San Petersburg had revealed the presence of trimetazidine, a banned substance apparently used to oxygenate the blood and increase stamina. For the first time in history, a medal ceremony was annulled and postponed until the case was resolved. When the IOC finally sets a date, the United States will be joined on the podium by Japan (silver) and Canada (bronze).
Despite this, Valieva was neither provisionally suspended nor expelled from the games, but instead participated days later in the individual competition amid extreme pressure. The Russian authorities, instead of protecting her by sparing her the drink, exposed her to the scrutinizing and censorious eyes of the world. She came out as the great favorite, but the extraordinary tension she experienced led her to make numerous mistakes. She finished fourth and in tears, seared by the glare of her trainer, the rigid and demanding champion shaper Eteri Tutberidze, whose role in the case has never been fully investigated. When Valieva left the court crying, Tutberidze was recorded live on television berating her in Russian: “Why did you leave him? Why did you stop fighting? Explain to me, why?”
In his initial defense, Valieva’s representatives alleged that he had mistakenly ingested trimetazidine, a heart medication his grandfather took. After extending the procedure for a year, in January 2023 the Russian authorities announced that she would not be sanctioned, as they accepted her explanations. They also added that since she was under 16 years of age at the time of the events, Valieva could not be considered responsible for her actions, but rather a person protected from her. This did not mean that Russia investigated its surroundings in search of the roots of the positive.
“Unforgivable doping”
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) appealed the decision to the CAS, whose resolution — “we have tried to find an extenuating circumstance so as not to sanction her with four years, but the Russian anti-doping code, which is the one we have followed, has left us no room for maneuver,” they explain from the Lausanne court—has filled them with joy, as noted in a statement also tinged with anger—“due to the understandable frustration of all those athletes affected by the delay in the resolution of the case”—and sadness.
“Underage doping is unforgivable. “Doctors, coaches or other support personnel found to have provided performance-enhancing substances to minors must face the full weight of the World Anti-Doping Code,” WADA said in a statement. “We are aware of the deep trauma and isolation that many child athletes suffer after a positive doping test. In fact, WADA encourages governments to consider passing laws, as some have already done, that criminalize underage doping.”