“Why did you let it go?” asked Coach Tutberidze, glaring sternly, her golden curls trembling in frustration. “Why did you stop fighting? Explain it to me, why? You let it go after that axel.” 

Her words, broadcast on live television, were directed towards her student, a 15-year-old girl named Kamila Valieva, immediately after what may well have been the most damaging four minutes of the teenager’s life – four minutes during which her legs had betrayed her in jump after jump, minutes during which the crowd had cheered in support and sympathy while her coach shook her head and stared at the ceiling, an unmitigated catastrophe that had ended with a prolonged moment of disbelief as the teenager skated around, dazed and alone and lost, on the wide expanse of ice. 

Valieva did not respond to her coach; she would end in fourth, a brutal disappointment. Later, when teammate Anna Shcherbakova, 17, won the Olympics, the cameras cut to her, sitting alone on a couch holding a stuffed animal; later, she would say she felt “emptiness.” Nearby, a third Russian skater, 17-year-old Alexandra Trusova, who had won silver but believed she deserved first place, weeped in front of the cameras: “I hate it! I don’t want to do anything in figure skating ever in my life! Everyone has a gold medal, and I don’t!” Eyes red from tears, she later told reporters, “I am not happy with the result. There is no happiness.” The cool facade had shattered, the kettle exploded, the mounting pressure of the last week broken wide open on the world stage. 

Valieva had dreamed of her Olympic moment since she was a little girl in Kazan, 450 miles east of Moscow. Even before her teen years, she was a natural, becoming one with the ice, one with the music, as though it was written into her DNA. During her meteoric rise, sports commentators began calling her the greatest womens’ figure skater of all time. She smashed world record after world record – nine of them in all – and quickly emerged as the heavy favorite to win gold in the womens’ individual event at the 2022 Olympics Games. And as Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” began to play, she carefully poised on the ice she called home, wearing a star-studded black costume with glowing red highlights that blurred when she spun. Everything was in place; on the surface, everything was perfect. 

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52 days prior to the womens’ individual event at the 2022 Olympic Games, Valieva tested positive for trimetazidine, a banned drug, at the Russian Figure Skating Championships in St. Petersburg, Russia. Trimetazidine, which allows better blood flow to the heart, was one of three drugs that Valieva tested positive for; together, they made up a sophisticated cocktail that improved overall heart performance. It took 45 days for the results of this test to become known, during which time Valieva was cleared to skate at the Games during an elaborate process necessitated by the regulatory consequences of Russia’s 2014 state-sponsored doping scheme. A day before the news broke, she helped lead the ROC to gold in the team figure skating event. 

The medal ceremony for the team event was hastily canceled after the news became public, and the Russian gold, and Valieva’s ability to skate in the individual event, were immediately uncertain. Questions arose: had Valieva known she was taking a banned drug? Was this an accident of taking her grandfather’s heart medication that included trimetazidine, as she contended, or part of a larger doping scheme? And most urgently, why had it taken 45 days for the drug test results to come to light? Valieva had tested negative twice in those 45 days – on January 13th and February 7th – and both results were timely. The IOC balked. “This was a complete and catastrophic failure to athletes and public confidence,” said Travis T. Tygart, the chief executive of the US Anti-Doping Agency, “[It] didn’t need to happen, and shouldn’t have happened.”

Despite precedent, under which several top athletes, including swimmer Sun Yang of China and bobsledder Nadezhda Sergeeva of Russia, had served bans after testing positive for trimetazidine, a three-person panel from the The Court of Arbitration for Sports (CAS) ruled on February 14th that Valieva would be allowed to skate in the womens’ individual event the next Thursday, February 17th while the investigation into her positive test continued. The leniency of their decision hinged on the fact that Valieva was a “Protected Person” (a minor) and that the test results were so delayed that they “impinged upon the Athlete’s ability to establish certain legal requirements for her benefit.” “None of this is the fault of the athlete,” their report continued, “and it has put her in a remarkably difficult position where she faces a lifetime of work being taken from her within days of the biggest event of her short career.” The report danced around the question of whether the drug had entered her system by mistake or was part of a doping scheme. 

While several of her Russian teammates defended her, the backlash across the figure skating world against the decision was immediate. Johnny Weir, three-time US national champion and NBC commentator, condemned the decision as a “slap in the face to the Olympics Games, to our sport, and to every athlete that’s ever competed in the Olympics clean.” As the Kremlin continued to dismiss the situation as a “misunderstanding,” the World Anti-Doping Agency and the Russian Anti-Doping Agency launched investigations into Coach Eteri Tutberidze and Russian team doctor Filipp Shvetsky. Rachel Denhollander, the first survivor to come forward publicly in the Nassar case, ridiculed the idea that Valieva could have concocted the cocktail of drugs on her own. “A child does not make a choice to take those kinds of medications unless they’re given to her by somebody who’s in authority,” she said. 

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Amid the firestorm of speculation and mounting criticism, Kamila Valieva continued to train for the individual event. Her job in Beijing was to win gold: for coach, for team, for country – to win gold as 15-year-old Julia Lipnitskaya (Olympics 2014), 16-year-old Elena Radionova (Worlds 2015), 17-year-old Anna Pogorilaya (Worlds 2016), and 15-year-old Alina Zagitova (Olympics 2018) had done before her. She was the most recent in a long line of young teenage girls who had risen to dizzying heights and then faltered almost immediately following their greatest success, to be replaced, as if by magic, by another generation of young skaters churned out by the Russian sports machine. 

This machine revolves around one school, Sambo 70 in Moscow, and in particular, a coach named Eteri Tutberidze. Tutberidze was well-known as a coach long before the 2022 Olympics; as a 10-year-old myself, I watched her on my TV screen conversing with a beaming 15-year-old Julia Lipnitskaya in the kiss-and-cry at the 2014 Winter Olympics, right after Lipnitskaya had carried the Russian team to gold. Although no one knew it at the time, at just 15 years old, with such a seemingly promising career, Lipnitskaya would never again win a medal of any kind at an international competition. She would retire in 2017 after complications with injuries and anorexia. 

Tutberidze was among a generation of enterprising young coaches who saw an opportunity in the early 1990s in the crumbling of the Soviet Union’s state-sponsored system that had trained young children for specific sports. A hierarchical system which consisted of a star coach, coaches below the star, and layers of smaller coaches and schools, this infrastructure shut out young coaches who wanted to start their own schools. 

During this period of tumult in Russian figure skating, Tutberidze, a former competitive skater herself from the US, “rocket[ed] past the rules,” Johnny Weir explained after a rare interview with Tutberidze. “[She] did it by herself… She had her own philosophy about training.” Talented young skaters flocked to her school, where they took on a harsh regime of training, running their quadruple jump-packed programs, often for over 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Questions and rumors about Tutberidze, her staff, and the skating entourage swirled long before 2022: could the athletes’ grueling training schedule be reliant on performance-enhancing drugs? But Tutberidze’s methods worked – she coached the first and second place medal winners in the womens’ event at PyeongChang 2018 and Beijing 2022 – and in the dazzle of victory after victory, the questions stayed in the shadows, while the champions, all in their mid-to-late teens, kept coming.

“It’s not really women’s figure skating anymore,” Gracie Gold, two-time US national champion, quipped in her article on The Cut. “It’s girls’ figure skating.” Due to inconsistency and lack of nuance, the old 6.0 judging system was thrown out in 2004, and the current one, according to Gold, “doesn’t allow girls to ever grow up because their womanly curves make the triple combinations and quads difficult to complete.” Taking advantage of their prepubescent light frame to jump to greater heights and spin faster, skaters who hit their peaks early do not learn the technique necessary for a prolonged career on the ice. The female teenager is uniquely revolutionary at four-rotation jumps precisely because puberty has not yet brought the development of breasts and hips. Thus, Lipnitskaya is not unique in finding her career petering out in a few short years: Radionova, Pogorilaya, and Zagitova would all struggle to get onto the podium in international competitions after their moment of fame and eventually retire in their late teens or early 20s after a succession of disappointing seasons. “You’ve got this window and there is an expiration date,” explained Dorian Lambelet Coleman, a Duke law professor who is also an expert on sex and gender in sports and a former athlete herself. “There is this point around 16 or 17 when it’s over. And at that point they are disposable.” 

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In sports where young female athletes are considered disposable, doping has had a long and inevitable history. At the 2014 Winter Olympics, dozens of Russian athletes, including at least 15 medal-winners, willingly or unwillingly partook in a state-run doping program. In a scheme that only came to light two years after the fact, Russian intelligence service and anti doping experts replaced tainted urine samples with month-old clean urine samples in the dead of night through a hand-sized hole in the wall – a scandal that shook the foundations of the most prestigious sporting event in the world. 

Long before Russia, from the 1960s until the 1980s East Germany gave the steroid Oral-Turinabol to young female athletes without their knowledge or consent as “vitamins.” These drugs have been linked to long-term health problems such as birth defects in the children of those athletes. East Germany’s authoritarian regime, swept up in nationalistic furor, needed to win at all costs – and at the end of the day, minors paid the price. 

At its core, Valieva’s case is yet another in which a young athlete, a minor, bears the consequences for the actions of adults who do not value her for anything more than the medals she can win for them. In a sport where the rules are designed so that the inevitable result is that athletes hit their peak before they hit puberty, is it surprising that somebody has exploited the system by exploiting the innocence, the dreams, the unquestioning deference to authority of children? The culture of winning at all costs that produced the coaches and doctors of Valieva’s entourage, is the same one that produced and shielded Larry Nassar and other abusers. 

In this case, the horror of it all came to us in the form of a heaving, crying, broken 15-year-old girl on international television. A 15-year-old girl with dreams had become the caution story, the poster girl for doping and Russian moral bankruptcy. A girl who would be a sophomore in high school carried all of this on the global stage because of the adults around her who had exploited her or stood back and let it happen. The chaos that followed her performance is emblematic of the price in humanity we are paying for the young stars on our TV screens, and by the time the IOC, the news networks, and the sponsors have cashed their checks and shrugged it off, the Russian skating machine will have found its next supernova from Samara or Yekaterinburg. 

The sport, the Olympics, has to rethink its approach to women’s figure skating. They can start by banning the individual perpetrators of Valieva’s positive test from the sport for life. Raising the minimum age from 15 to 18 might help since at that age, women will be more emotionally and physically developed to withstand the rigors of training and make their own decisions with coaching and medical input. But ultimately, the problem is culturally entrenched: as long as gold medals and glory remain the sole standard of excellence and value – whether for nationalistic reasons, the personal ambitions of a coach, or the guiding motto of an institution – real change will be slow and perfunctory. 

Sources:

• The facts
  • Kamila Valieva (Wikipedia)
  • ‘None of this is the fault of the athlete,’ CAS panel writes in Valieva report.
  • Star Russian Figure Skater Tested Positive for Banned Drug
  • A Russian Star Falls and Another Rises in a Blur of Jumps, Tumbles and Tears
  • The Russian School at the Center of the Controversial Beijing Olympics Womens’ Figure Skating Event
• History of doping at the Olympics
  • In the Kamila Valieva Story, Echoes of a Dark Era of Doping (NYT)
  • Two young athletes, two very different outcomes in an Olympic doping scandal.
  • Lest We Forget, the U.S., Too, Spent Time in the Doping Wilderness
  • Russian Insider Says State-Run Doping Fueled Olympic Gold
• Womens’ figure skating and young girls (exploitation in sports)
  • Eteri Tutberidze
  • Stop Asking Why America Doesn’t Win Olympic Medals in Women’s-Singles Skating (Gracie Gold)
  • Figure skating-Nassar whistleblower says Valieva case highlights vulnerability of young athletes