Can we trust anything in skating right now?

I unashamedly love figure skating. I love watching it as a fan, and love covering it as a sports journalist. I delight in flutzes, janky and chic costuming, quads, twizzles, and all the things. Skating social media is a wonder, a blessed mix of total technical experts, people dying over the music picks, and the randos.

The Winter Olympics are the high days for the skating community, bringing the sport out of the shadows for a bit. Skating was the thing in the 90s, thanks to Nancy/Tonya driving it to the front pages for all the wrong reasons. The world calmed down, save for the 2002 Salt Lake scoring drama, which led to a judging overhaul.

I’ve sat back and watched skating at the 2022 Beijing Games with a mixture of sadness and disappointment. I hate that the sport is front page, again for all the wrong reasons.

The TL;DR for those not into skating: Russia’s Kamila Valieva, one of the best young talents in the sport - possibly ever - with insane sheer potential and skills, may be guilty of doping. A banned cardiac drug, given to treat angina, was found in her system in late December by the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RADA). The news of this result, off an A-sample (meaning, the first of two samples taken from her), came to light last week when the Russian skaters took gold in the team event. The medal ceremony never happened, leading the world to ask WTF.

Turns out, a whole lot of WTF.

To be clear, “Russia” is not “officially” at this Olympics, as their Olympic Committee is on the IOC version of double-secret probation systematically for doping at the 2014 Sochi Games. The slap of the wrist, done with verrry scwary bureaucratic feather, let Russia essentially keep going as usual - down to Vladimir Putin rolling VIP with bottle service at the Opening Ceremony.

The turns this case has taken are mind-bending. Valieva is 15. She is a minor and cannot be held responsible for the drugs in her system. An adult got them for her, and had her take them. It doesn’t matter if she knew it was wrong…the adult is responsible for leading her down the path.

We now know that she had multiple heart drugs, with only one on the banned list, in her sample. She is not known to have heart issues, with the cardiac demands of skating likely precluding an Olympic-level career if she indeed was sick.

Travis Tygart, the head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, told the New York Times today that her drug cocktail is…interesting.

“It’s a trifecta of substances — two of which are allowed, and one that is not allowed,” Tygart told the NYT. The combo could, “be aimed at increasing endurance, reducing fatigue and promoting greater efficiency in using oxygen.”

Oh, I can see how that would help somebody skate better. Hell, better endurance, less fatigue and more efficiency would help me run around Costco in record time.

She was suspended by the IOC from competing in the Olympics, with an appeal launched to get her back on the ice for Tuesday’s ladies short program. Her age turned out to be a hinge for the Court of Arbitration for Sport, as it ruled Monday for Valieva (and RADA). The panel said she could not be held responsible because she is under 16, the magic line for minors in the world anti-doping rules. There was a 6-week delay between testing and telling her the results, also swaying the panel about her case.

The panel said, until the B sample can be tested and full innocence/guilt be determined, it would be wrong to not let her compete. What if she was banned, and then found innocent? And the flip, what if she’s guilty and now winning a gold medal over the clean athletes?

So that brought us to today. Skating was live this morning, and yeah, it was sort of a buzzkill to see her take the ice. Valieva is brilliant, her gifts making skating history, such as landing a quad salchow and a quad toe in the team event. No woman had ever landed a quad at the Olympics before. She threw down two, easy, and even tried a third that she tripled.

It was uncomfortable to watch her in the short. This should have been the throw-down, and us watching her execute at the big dance.

South Korea's Kim Yuna, the 2010 Olympic champion and 2014 silver medalist, weighed in hard before the skate.

I felt regret for Valieva. I felt worse for the other skaters. Even NBC’s Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski, the bouncy rays of light for all things skating, were bummed and disgusted. They stayed pretty dead silent during her skate, like they refused to validate it.

(Below, the normal joy of Johnny and Tara. That was gone today.)

The what-ifs raced through my mind. She is a kid. Valieva can’t even drive. She should be a high school sophomore. She is a God-given talent. But somebody in her world, with authority and evil self-interest, chose a cruel path to give her a banned substance. We will never know what she really is, there will forever be an asterisk, if not a few documentaries, about this bad moment that we so wanted to be good.

And no, I am not buying the bizarre Russian cover tale of her ingesting the drug because she drank from a glass used by her grandfather. It was his medicine! All his fault! Please. I am fluent in Lance Armstrong and smirking with the smile of Putin at that one. Nyet.

She skated. It was OK. She boofed a bit on a triple axel, but did enough to hit first place. She didn’t look particularly excited or happy on the ice, scrunching her face a little and appearing to sniffle a bit at the end.

I totally agreed with Weir’s serious assessment when she was done:

“All I can feel like I can say is that was the short program of Kamila Valieva at the Olympics," Weir said.

Lipinski, who was 15 when she won the 1998 Nagano ladies gold, added, "I don't know how many times over the past year that I've said she is the best figure skater I've ever seen. And just saying that now not only makes me confused, it makes me angry ... and disoriented by everything I thought that I knew.

“It makes you question everything. These skaters give up their lives for this moment, to get to this place. Why?”

Why indeed. The questions are too many, the answers too elusive. In the end, justice may never be done here. If she is found innocent, the experience of the Olympics will still be tainted for all of the skaters. Her gold medal(s) will never be fully shiny. The sport is not going to erase the stain of this drama.

Somebody gave this child medications that have no reason to be in her system.

And if she is guilty, the Olympic field was forced to compete against a dirty skater and expend emotional energy dealing with her presence. The entire process of the International Skating Union and IOC was shredded for illegal gain. The Russians played with the rules and nearly got away with it again.

Somebody gave this child medications that have no reason to be in her system.

It’s simply sad, and there is a kid being sacrificed in the process.

What do you think? Leave me your thoughts in the comments.

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Open Court publishes on Tuesdays and Fridays, bringing you the stuff we need to talk about with author and sports journalist Joanne C. Gerstner.

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