The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has decided to impose a four-year suspension on Russian skater Kamila Valieva, who tested positive for doping at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics.
The sanction comes into force on December 25, 2021, so all results, titles, medals or awards achieved since then are annulled. Thus, Russia will lose the gold medal it won in the figure skating team event and that will now go to the United States.
The Kremlin has described the CAS decision as “political.” “Of course, we do not agree with this decision. From my point of view, it is a political decision,” criticized Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, quoted by Russian news agencies.
Valieva’s case occurred during the Beijing Winter Olympics, in February 2022, when it was learned that the skater had tested positive for the banned substance trimetazidine in a test carried out two months earlier, on December 25.
At that time Valieva, who was 15 years old, had already won the Olympic team gold and, because the case was not resolved, she was able to continue competing and was fourth in the individual final.
In the middle of the Beijing Games, on February 8, 2022, the Stockholm laboratory that carried out the analysis on Valieva informed the parties of the positive result for trimetazidine (angina pectoris medication that appears on the WADA list of prohibited products). .
The Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) provisionally and immediately suspended the athlete, which prevented her from continuing to participate in Beijing 2022, although she appealed to the disciplinary commission of the Russian agency, which upheld her claim.
At that time, the CAS already had to make a first decision on the case, upon receiving resources from the IOC, WADA and the International Skating Federation (ISU) against RUSADA’s position.
The court allowed the skater to continue in competition, considering that preventing her participation would cause “irreparable harm” to a protected person for being under 16 years of age.
The athlete alleged in her defense that the prohibited substance found in her urine, trimetazidine, came from accidental contamination with a medication with which her grandfather treated angina.
Valieva performed in Beijing for the first time in history a quadruple jump on ice in the team modality, although in individuals, in the midst of the controversy over her positive result, she could only finish fourth in the competition, in which Russia participated with the team. in full, but without anthem or flag, as a consequence of state doping.
After the Games, RUSADA acquitted the athlete, a decision that WADA appealed to the CAS and requested a four-year sanction, with the withdrawal of the medal she achieved in Beijing and the annulment of her results from December 2022.
The ISU also asked the TAD to annul the RUSADA decision, to sanction the athlete with a suspension period determined by the court itself, plus the annulment of all her results, and to decide what consequences Valieva’s infraction should have on the result of the Beijing 2022 team event and determine the final result of the same.
