Olympic mess
This is glory? This is honor?
YOU KNOW that Olympic skating news has made its way out of the niche Olympic press, even out of emailed sports updates and morning TV programs, and into mainstream America when Wally Hall spends column space writing about it.
This month, skating has pushed basketball conference season and football off-season down the list of priorities for the American sports world.
And it isn’t good.
Not since Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding has figure skating seen such a mess. And if Red China thought it would win the world’s approval (which it desperately wants) with these Games, the women’s skating competition put an end to that.
No matter what else happens, the legacy of the 2022 Games will be skating athletes saying they hate the sport, and the face of the Games will be a crying Kamila Valieva.
The 15-year-old Ms. Valieva had her life turned upside down by a doping scandal, but was still allowed to participate in the Olympics competition while the other athletes stood by, perhaps wondering what a body had to do to get sent home.
Kamila Valieva would be considered a minor in this country. So any performance-enhancing drugs were very likely given to her by somebody older. The young lady on the Russian team (of course) tested positive for trimetazidine, which is a heart drug—illegal in the United States—that increases blood flow.
It also increases headaches, liver dysfuction, and low blood pressure. As The Dallas Morning News put it in an editorial a few days ago: “Who gives a drug like that to a healthy child?”
Answer: People cold enough to want medals, and everything that goes with them.
Speaking of cold, a completely different controversy popped up the other night when Kamila Valieva came off the ice. After days of being hounded by the press and scolded by the commentariat, she flopped during her routine, and fell several times. As she came off the ice, visibly upset, her coach yelled at her: “Why did you let it go? Why did you stop fighting?”
It was such an awful thing to do that the International Olympic Committee president, who has a reputation of defending the Russians, told the press: “When I afterwards saw how [Ms. Valieva] was received by her closest entourage, with such, what appeared to be a tremendous coldness, it was chilling to see this. Rather than giving her comfort, rather than to try to help her, you could feel this chilling atmosphere, this distance.”
Speaking of even colder, the Kremlin got involved. After the IOC president spoke, the Russian government put this out: “He does not like the toughness of our coaches, but everyone knows that in elite sports, the coach’s toughness is key to the students’ victories.”
All of this would be bad enough if Kamila Valieva was the only one hurt. After all, what are little girls in this sport supposed to do, other than put aside their only childhood to train for this competition, and be chewed up, spit out, and forgotten after they turn 20?
But there were others on that ice. The silver medal winner, Alexandra Trusova—also a Russian—hit five quadruple jumps, but reports say her performance, while strongest in history with those jumps, wasn’t artistic enough to get the top medal. She was heard shouting at the side of the rink: “I hate this sport! I won’t go onto the ice again!”
(She skated to the song “Cruella” from the movie soundtrack. Message anybody?)
Anna Shcherbakova, the wily veteran of the Russian figure skating team—17 years old—won the gold. According to the story in the Associated Press report after the competition, she didn’t know how to react to everything going on around her: “I still don’t comprehend what has happened. On the one hand I feel happy, on the other I feel this emptiness inside.”
Emptiness inside.
From the gold medal winner. The Olympic Oath mentions that athletes will compete “for the glory of sport and the honor of our teams.” This is glory? This is honor? Maybe there should be a minimum age that the Olympics enforces before athletes can begin to train for these competitions. Maybe a minimum age would allow these kids to live real childhoods before they are whisked away to train for a country’s pride. That would mean fewer performances like the five quadruple jumps we saw the other night.
But it might also mean fewer nights like we witnessed after the skates came off.