OPINION:
Kamila Valieva, the Russian Olympic Committee’s 15-year-old figure skater at the center of the latest doping scandal, has placed fourth in the women’s singles competition in Beijing. However, her failure to get podium shouldn’t encourage audiences and officials to ignore the injustices around the situation and figure skating as a whole. (After all, she is still expected to receive a gold medal for her participation in the team event, should the current investigation let her positive drug test slide.) Testing positive for a banned drug — here, a heart medication, trimetazidine — should mean no competing, no matter what place you come in.
Normally, an athlete would be immediately suspended from the sport until an investigation has concluded. In Ms. Valieva’s case, her suspension would have included the Games. One could compare Ms. Valieva’s case to that of American Sha’Carri Richardson, who tested positive for cannabis, another banned substance, who was suspended for a month and was chosen not to go to the Tokyo Games last summer by her coaches. Ms. Richardson tweeted about the subject, asking for what the difference was besides race.
Rather than focusing on race, the differences between Ms. Valieva and Ms. Richardson’s cases demonstrate the integrity behind Team USA and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency when compared to the ROC, the International Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and the Russian Anti-Doping Agency — shortened to RUSADA.
The U.S. always aims to play by the rules. While one has great sympathy for Ms. Richardson’s situation, a banned drug is a banned drug, and Team USA wanted to avoid the scandal that the ROC is currently in.
In Ms. Valieva’s situation, the CAS decided to uphold RUSADA’s lifting of her suspension, and the International Olympic Committee is bound to the CAS’ ruling. The IOC and World Anti-Doping Agency, among others, expressed their dissent from CAS’ decision. Most big names in the sport — from NBC’s Olympians-turned-commentators Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski to South Korean skating star Yuna Kim — condemned Ms. Valieva’s presence in competition, where she had just allowed the ROC to win gold in the team event.
The CAS cited Ms. Valieva’s status as a minor — making her a “protected person” — as a reason to allow her to compete while her drug test and coach, Eteri Tutberidze (also the coach for the ROC’s other two skating ladies, Anna Shcherbakova and Alexandra Trusova), are investigated. As a minor, Ms. Valieva couldn’t have properly consented to use a banned drug, and she might not have even realized that she had been consuming it.
Looping back in Ms. Richardson’s case, as a 21-year-old, she knew she had consumed cannabis, and she properly owned up to it when the news broke. While there is an argument for and movement to remove cannabis from the list of banned drugs in sports, there can be no exceptions while rules are in place; holding ourselves to standards is how we ensure that sports stay clean.
This is exactly why Ms. Valieva should have also been suspended, as many other athletes, like U.S. skater Jessica Calalang, have while they are under investigation for a positive drug test. If anything, this ruling suggests it was about pleasing the ROC and Ms. Tutberidze’s skating school, Sambo-70. Enabling the Russian doping scandal to continue compromises all sports and every clean athlete involved. It also enables child abuse within the sport: CAS used the prevention of “irreparable harm” to Ms. Valieva’s career as another reason to let her skate, yet such irreparable harm has already been done to her through her coach.
Several outlets, including FiveThirtyEight, Slate and Business Insider, have noted the suspicious conditions of Ms. Tutberidze’s skaters. From their “expiration dates” (none skate with the same success after turning 18) to extreme diets and training schedules, it’s overdue that her skating club got investigated. This is no longer a phenomenon that figure skating fans online helplessly discuss in threads; it’s now receiving adequate mainstream coverage. Women’s figure skating has a problem that, if left uncorrected, could bury the discipline altogether.
Whether or not Ms. Tutberidze comes out unscathed, the International Skating Union ought to put new rules in place: A better drug-testing protocol, a scoring adjustment so that coaches aren’t tempted to push their skaters’ limits and dope, and a restriction of pre-rotations for jumps, which may give career-breaking back damage in addition to an unfair advantage.
Another way to combat doping in all sports would be to place harsher punishments when positive tests occur. This could include giving athletes longer suspensions — no matter their age — enacting consequences for coaches, and placing more trust into WADA instead of nations’ own agencies, like RUSADA, which has a history of covering up positive drug tests.
It’s time the world — the CAS, ISU, IOC, U.S. Figure Skating — not only speak of the value of fairness but also demand it of others, including the ROC.
- Maggie Rothfus is a copy editor at The Washington Times.
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