‘Chilling to see’: Valieva saga highlights cruel treatment of Russian figure skaters

Beijing: “Why did you let it go? Why did you stop fighting?,” Kamila Valieva’s coach said to the 15-year-old as she collapsed four times onto the ice in Beijing, a gold medal slipping away.

Battered, bruised and broken after a fortnight at the centre of a global doping scandal, the Russian world No.1 cried as she clasped a soft toy while Eteri Tutberidze berated her. Behind her, teammate Alexandra Trusova, 17, who won silver, was inconsolable.

“I hate skating. I hate it. I hate this sport. I will never skate again,” said Trusova.

Kamila Valieva with choreographer Daniil Gleikhengauz and coach Eteri Tutberidze Credit: Getty Images

Tutberidze, who runs the Sambo-70 club in Moscow, where all of Russia’s Olympic figure skaters come from, knew Valieva and Trusova only had one shot at an individual gold. That’s because Tutberidze does not give them another chance.

Sambo-70 only produces one Olympics wonders - lean and young. Critics say they are discarded after one Games for another to take their place and before puberty stops them from being able to leap above the ice with the lightness of a child.

This time it was Anna Shcherbakova, Trusova and Valieva’s teammate, who won gold. She could only muster the joy to say while she was happy to win, “I don’t feel like it’s me they are talking about,” as she came off the ice in Beijing as an Olympic champion.

Anna Shcherbakova won gold, but felt she wasn’t the centre of attention.Credit: Getty Images

In this gold medal factory in Moscow, the ice skaters who join as children too often leave as broken young adults.

First there was Evgenia Medvedeva, who was told by Tutberidze to go back out and skate “or you’re nothing” after barely being able to stand. Then there was Elizabet Tursynbaeva, who damaged her back so badly she could no longer hold herself up on the ice, and then there was Daria Usacheva, who left the sport in a wheelchair.

There are at least a half-a-dozen more who have recounted a decade of torment at Sambo-70. All of them teenagers, left with physical and psychological injuries that will take years to repair.

Now there is Valieva, who took the Russian team to gold last week and landed the first quadruple jump at an Olympics but also collapsed in her individual event and tested positive for a banned stamina-enhancing substance, trimetazidine.

Valieva’s Russian entourage claims she took it mistakenly six weeks ago from her grandfather’s heart medication but is not the only drug Valieva has taken. Hypoxen and L-carnitine - two legal substances that improve blood flow - suggest there is a coordinated approach to performance-enhancement well beyond the capabilities of a 15-year-old.

All three are not necessarily used to achieve peak performance in an Olympic final, but to build stamina to withstand a brutal and punishing training regime. The kind of regime that has produced six Olympic medallists for Sambo-70, and one that creates the only female athletes in the world who can do quadruple jumps.

The World Anti Doping Agency banned Russia from international sport for years of state-sanctioned doping in 2019 only for the IOC to allow Russia back in under the Russian Olympic Committee flag a year later.

But on Friday Thomas Bach, the IOC president, said he was appalled by what he had seen.

“I must say I was very disturbed yesterday when I watched the competition on TV. She faced pressure beyond my imagination, and particularly for a girl of 15 years old,” he said.

“When afterwards I saw how she was received by her closest entourage with what appeared to be such a tremendous coldness, it was chilling to see this. All of this does not give me much confidence in the closest entourage of Kamila.”

Bach said the people who are responsible for her treatment would be held accountable “in the strongest possible way”.

“The ones who have administered this drug in her body, these are the ones who are guilty,” he said.

But that IOC process of accountability has been clouded for years in murky backroom deals, and a Russian Anti-Doping Agency that refuses to cooperate with international investigations and an enfeebled World Anti-Doping Agency that is beholden to the IOC and its revenue streams.

“It’s been eight years since Sochi and we are still talking about Russian doping,” said Noah Hoffman, a double US Winter Olympian, who now works with Human Rights Watch. “My heart broke watching her skate last night.”

Bach said on Friday the IOC had wanted to stop Valieva from being sent back out onto the rink at all after the positive test result. But he said the IOC was beholden to the ruling from the Court of Arbitration for Sport that she was a “protected person” because she was aged under 16 and therefore stopping her from competing would cause her “irreparable damage”.

Rob Koehler, the director general of the Global Athlete advocacy movement said the way the situation had been handled is “more than a doping issue”. “This is an issue of child abuse,” he said. “They put her back on the ice. If that is not the psychological abuse of a young child I don’t know what is.”

The CAS ruling could now set the stage for one of the few meaningful actions that could be taken in the wake of this tawdry affair - setting an age limit on Olympic participants at 16 - so that all athletes are subject to the same doping restrictions.

“It’s maybe dangerous to give my personal opinion on this before these discussions have taken place but for me personally, the anti-doping rules are there to ensure a fair competition,” said Bach. “This leads me to the conclusion that in a fair competition, the same rules have to apply to everybody.”

If the IOC follows through, such a move would have far-reaching consequences for all athletes at both summer and winter Olympics. US skaters like Mariah Bell have been campaigning for an age limit after seeing what damage has been done to children by their coaches. Gymnastics restricted its Olympians to 16 years two decades ago; it has taken the equally brutal world of figure skating more than two decades to potentially be forced to catch up.

That has left athletes like Trusova, Valieva and Shcherbakova burnt out and bereft. Valieva raced through the Olympic mixed zone clutching her toy with a hood over head this week, a child unable to face questions from the media that they should never have had to ask.

Trusova left as an Olympic silver medallist, a teenager with tears running down her cheeks.

“I wanted to cry, so I cried,” she said. “I’ve been three weeks alone without my mum, my dogs. So I cry.”

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