John Riordan: Ice storm intrigue in Beijing leaves skaters feeling cold

The curious case of Olympic athlete Kamila Valieva played out against the backdrop of escalating US-Russia tensions

Thu, 17 Feb, 2022 - 19:02

Americans look at you bemused when you tell them you didn’t grow up skiing and they can’t fathom a world where the quadrennial Winter Olympics are anything but a rite of passage.

Here in the US, it ranks equally with the Summer Games; in Ireland in the 90s, Cool Runnings and the odd bit of passive consumption of Ski Sunday on the BBC was about as far as we got. No further than the catchy opening credits, honestly.

Winter-themed disciplines on snow and ice occupy a special place in the US national psyche — admittedly almost exclusively in the sections of society which can afford all the necessary trappings and equipment.

Over the decades, the Winter Olympics have either reflected the politics of the Cold War or reminisced cagily to those dark days. The ‘Miracle on Ice’ of 1980 was one notable peak of the athletes getting to add their voice to the larger geopolitical context. That was when the US Ice Hockey team shocked their Soviet Union opponents — four-time defending gold medallists at the time — by defeating them in the gold medal semi-final in Upstate New York’s Lake Placid.

It’s a sporting moment often recollected here and it probably resides somewhere in the top three or four of any American achievement, across any sport ever.

Most of us probably couldn’t have foreseen that going into these current Olympic Games, a throwback to the potential of conflict would loom over the build-up as well as the event itself.

As Russian troops continued to increase in number on the Ukrainian border over the last few weeks, what it meant for the Olympics in Beijing was a source of widespread concern. There was almost a sense of relief at the speculation that Vladimir Putin would wait until after the Olympics to invade. Priorities!

While the chance of war served as a dramatic backdrop, concern also lay in the fact that the hosts’ record on human rights needed to be addressed by the athletes themselves. The US had months ago enacted a diplomatic boycott but would the men and women representing their country take a similar approach? Would they acknowledge the repression of Uyghur Muslims and other minorities in Xinjiang?

The international intrigue was fraught pre-Games and as the tension in Ukraine oscillated up and down and up again, one athlete story emerged to seemingly encapsulate the reemergence of the deep chasm between the US and Russia.

Figure Skating is not a sport I’ve ever spent a great deal of time watching or trying to understand but the curious case of Kamila Valieva had me up at 5am Thursday to watch the unfathomable drama of it all play out during the culmination of the Women’s Free Skate competition.

As you likely heard last week, news emerged that the 15-year-old Russian figure skater, who had been favoured to win golds in team and individual disciplines in Beijing, tested positive for trimetazidine, a banned medication used to increase blood flow to the heart.

The test was taken a few months ago so the timing of the announcement was oddly opportune and particularly poignant; not just because of her age but because it arrived just after she became the first female to ever land the infamously difficult “quadruple jump“ at the Olympics.

Her phenomenal achievement — quite simply spinning in the air four full rotations before landing cleanly on one foot during a four- or five-minute routine combining technical and artistic excellence — helped the Russian skaters win the team figure skating competition. But quickly the shadows of cheating were cast across the skater and her teammates — and crucially those around her.

In a move that surprised many observers, the International Olympic Committee chose not to send Valieva home from Beijing. Instead, the Court of Arbitration for Sport gave her the green light to continue competing, arguing that she is a “protected person” because of her young age. It was vital to prioritise her personal welfare, they concluded.

“The panel considered that preventing the athlete to compete at the Olympic Games would cause her irreparable harm in the circumstances,” said Matthieu Reeb, director general of the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Heading into Thursday morning’s free skate section, Valieva was leading the women’s individual short programme after dominating once again 48 hours previously and nobody knew where to look.

What made this climactic event all the more mind blowing was that not only had each athlete to face the prospect of challenging the lead of once-in-a-generation talent and not only had they to do so knowing she had failed a drug test but if any of them could find a way of joining her in the top three medal positions, there would be no ceremony until a resolution of the case.

In an obviously unprecedented move, the IOC decided to delay any medal ceremonies involving Valieva indefinitely. There was no ceremony for the team figure-skating event, which wrapped up last week with Russia in first.

The same scenario was dramatically avoided Thursday after the distraught teenager completed a flawed effort which denied her enough points to rank high enough for a medal — a medal of which she potentially ultimately would have been stripped anyway.

It was as bizarre an event as forecasted. I’m in an echo chamber of the US NBC broadcast of the Games where the frustration was heightened, full of historical grievances. They were there to document but document what exactly?

The parade of clearly frustrated competitors, suppressing their feelings behind graceful displays, emerging one by one to compete for a likely tainted medal rounded out with the emergence of Valieva who capitulated under the pressure. Her confused gold- and silver-winning team-ates were unsure how to respond.

Of course, as ever with rule-breaking of this nature, it’s the entourage of technical staff around the athlete which have most blame to shoulder. In using that ploy to desperately clutch at straws and pluck out empathy for Valieva, the other skaters are forgotten. At most, five of her competitors had any hope of a medal Thursday but whether you were a medal contender or a skater making up the rest of the forlorn sports, it all seemed somehow pointless.

Then there were the comparisons to the case of Sha’Carri Richardson, the American sprinter who was disqualified from the 2020 Tokyo Games after she tested positive for cannabis — not a performance enhancer — which she had smoked after learning her mother had passed away last year.

“Can we get a solid answer on the difference of her situation and mines [sic]?” Richardson opined on Twitter last week. “My mother died and I can’t run and was also favored to place top 3. The only difference I see is I’m a black young lady.”

On Tuesday, it emerged that Valieva tested positive for two other heart medications which, while not being on the list of banned substances, are unlikely to be necessary to be consumed by an adolescent.

“It’s a trifecta of substances — two of which are allowed and one that is not allowed,” Travis Tygart, the CEO of the US Anti-Doping Agency, told The New York Times.

He added that the cocktail appears “to be aimed at increasing endurance, reducing fatigue, and promoting greater efficiency in using oxygen.” As with the Tokyo Games last summer, Valieva is among those athletes competing for the Russian Olympic Committee instead of the nation known as the Russian Federation after the country was banned from participating in the Olympics because of a state-sponsored doping programme.

The injustice that she was allowed to compete at all is twofold for lovers of US Figure Skating: that this story has shifted the focus from the American winner of the men’s event, Nathan Chen, and that the athlete herself would have been talented enough without doping to be able lift her greatness above the wargames playing out elsewhere.

- @JohnWRiordan