Russia’s Kamila Valieva will skate on, but the doping debacle remains a mess

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/02/2022 (1324 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BEIJINGShe is a child. That is the thing to remember amid all the sturm and drang, all the tumult and outrage, all the cascading disgrace.

On Monday, 15-year-old Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva was cleared to skate at the Olympics despite a two-month-old positive doping test that surfaced last week. The substance in question, trimetazidine, is a heart drug and banned. But Tuesday, Valieva will compete.

It is an incredible mess. The case had gone to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, or CAS, after the positive test popped up Feb. 8. The sample, collected on Christmas, was long delayed. The Russian anti-doping agency, RUSADA, which should only be considered an anti-doping agency in the most superficial use of the term, both suspended her and then lifted her suspension, so that was the question for CAS: Could she still skate?

CAS said yes, based on a sort of Schrödinger’s logic. CAS noted that Valieva was a protected person under the World Anti-Doping Agency Code, which she is: A recent revision to the code allows for minors who test positive to escape suspension if it wasn’t their fault. Which may yet happen in this case.

But CAS also interpreted the code while seeing a different sort of proverbial cat. WADA said there is no section that allows protected person status to apply to a provisional suspension; it is just sitting out until you are cleared or convicted. CAS, though, ruled that because there is nothing in the code that forbids the application of protected person status to a provisional suspension, then it can be applied.

Evidence of absence, absence of evidence, let’s call the whole thing off.

And this is where we get to the meat of the reasoning. It’s what the panel called “fundamental principles of fairness, proportionality, irreparable harm, and the relative balance of interests” in that Valieva has not been convicted of a doping offence yet, and should the B sample come back negative or should she not be found at fault or responsible, banning her from skating here without that certainty “would cause her irreparable harm in these circumstances.”

CAS also noted Valieva had not tested positive here — irrelevant — and that the delay in processing was not her fault, and robbed her of the ability to mount a fuller defence.

In a way, you can understand. The five-week delay was an indication something went terribly wrong. As a minor, it is possible Valieva will suffer no significant sanction for the offence; what 15-year-old girl can be held to account for an informed decision to dope? If she will suffer no suspension anyway, why keep her from competing here, especially when she hasn’t been officially convicted yet? Squint and you can see it.

But in its statement WADA noted that RUSADA did not mark the sample as a priority, which unless you are naive means the Russian system screwed that up. As USADA head Travis Tygart noted to the Star last week, none of RUSADA, WADA or the International Skating Union made sure that every sample was accounted for.

All the broken parts of the system had to conspire to create this mess. At the jurisdictional level, the International Olympic Committee claims it is merely an impartial witness to this whole alphabet-soup dumbshow. They say it belongs to WADA, or the IOC’s International Testing Agency, which was originally going to be called the Independent Testing Agency until a Swiss court said it wasn’t actually independent.

But the whole thing has an air of a child playing with his toy dinosaurs in a sandbox — one called the ITA and one called WADA and one called CAS — while claiming the dinosaurs are all responsible for their actions. And in the end, Russia has escaped penalty. The IOC has worked very hard to shape these organizations in versions of its image, and that should always be kept in mind.

And still, this is such a mess that the IOC decided there will be no medal ceremony for the team competition here, where Russia won gold, and there will be no medal ceremony in the women’s singles competition if and when Valieva destroys the field. Russia got away with its state-sponsored doping program because the IOC worked all sides of the aisle and still hasn’t missed a Games, and that led us here. The system is clearly broken, and it doesn’t appear to be accidental.

And at the heart of it is this peerless genius, an ethereal girl made flesh, who has spent the past few days falling in practice, weeping at rinkside and being rushed past the press through the mixed zone as reporters shout out questions like “Are you clean?” and Russian media confront the Western press who ask the question.

Russia has a history of burning through teenage female skaters: injuries, eating disorders, all the consequences of treating children as disposable pieces. Valieva may be the greatest of them all. She shouldn’t have to go through this.

But in protecting her based on her age, the panel allowed Russia to continue to exploit her based on her age. That was inevitable, in a way. Either they doped her and she got caught, or they doped her and she got caught and got to skate anyway. What a debacle.

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It is all so sad: an example of the warped, greed-and-power-based priorities of the IOC and international sport, fuelled by disposable athletes and riggable rules which distilled has left us this precocious child who has been betrayed, allowed to compete but in a cauldron, deemed dirty by competitors and the world, under pressures that are not under her control.

She is a child, competing in a world of adults. The adults let her down.

Maybe Valieva falls down and weeps, and maybe she wins a towering gold and Russia throws a coach into the thresher to save its own reputation, and maybe the medals get clawed back in future.

But for now, at the Games while everybody is watching, it is clear what will happen: Valieva and Russia will skate.

Bruce Arthur is a Toronto-based columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @bruce_arthur