Dessert a seedy turn in doping report
On the second anniversary of the 2022 Olympic team figure skating competition, 730 days after the beginning of one of the most tortured doping sagas in international sports history, the Court of Arbitration for Sport released its very serious, 129-page decision on the Kamila Valieva case.
In a nutshell, here’s what we learned: Valieva claimed the banned substance that was in her body got there because she ate her grandfather’s strawberry dessert.
CAS didn’t fall for it.
A little more than a week ago, a threemember CAS panel threw the book at Valieva, suspending her for four years and disqualifying her 2022 Olympic results.
But in a preposterous twist that seems entirely appropriate for this ridiculous story, this arduous journey into the depths of Russian cheating and the abject failures of international sports officials has now landed in the Valieva family kitchen; more precisely, in grandpa’s strawberry dessert.
In the report, which CAS made public Wednesday, Valieva said the prohibited substance (the banned heart medication trimetazidine) entered her body because she ate a strawberry dessert her grandfather made on a chopping block, the same chopping block that he also used to crush his medicine, according to Valieva, who was 15 at the time. What did CAS have to say about this? “The CAS panel determined that this explanation was not corroborated by any concrete evidence and that the athlete was not able to establish that she had not committed the (anti-doping rule violation) intentionally.”
In other words: Nice try, see you in four years.
In the CAS decision, the word doping is mentioned 217 times. The name Valieva appears 105 times.
Then the story takes an unexpected turn from Lance Armstrong to Julia Child.
The word dessert is in the report 75 times. And strawberry? A whopping 43 times. Alas, nary a mention of tart or shortcake.
As a comparison, the word Olympics appears only 14 times.
Valieva’s strawberry dessert excuse is actually just one of three she tried out, according to the CAS report. In a July 2022 interview with the Russian AntiDoping Agency, which itself was suspended from 2015 to 2018 for helping Russian athletes cheat, she first went with what we’ll call the “grandpa tainted the dessert” defense:
Said Valieva: “Yes we had lunch, Grandfather also often gave me something like apple pure or a berry sweet made from berries … condensed milk, bananas or some juice, and maybe … He also takes pills following the doctors’ recommendations and, probably, this pill got into a dessert, which he usually gives to me. Or, I saw a few times accidentally, that he crushed the pills with the knife and dissolves them in a glass, and took them. So I might have drunk from the same glass or there, at home, I might have eaten something from the same chopping board and so on.”
The added benefit of this line of defense is it’s at least two excuses in one.
The second version is so simple and general that it basically works for any doping violation: “The contamination of some medications, as this happened before, those situations arose and that is why that could not be excluded.”
And the third version? It calls out security at the 2021 Russian figure skating championships, where Valieva tested positive, suggesting who knows who could have done who knows what:
“In St. Petersburg, in comparison with organization of other events, with … Sochi or Olympic Games … the narrative during the Russian Championship in St. Petersburg was not really good as the premises where the athletes were coming in, warming up, eating and generally getting ready before start, were full of strangers, who definitely should not be there. So, there were a lot of relatives of the athletes, who were freely moving around, had … free access to the dressing room as well as to the area where athletes were eating. Mother’s friend also got an accreditation, however, I cannot say that she is somehow relevant to sport, but she still got the accreditation with high level of access, so she could get to the areas … .”
The quick takeaway from this excuse: While Russian figure skating security clearly needs to up its game, “Mother’s friend” definitely knows how to work the Russian skating credentialing system.
All of this sounds less like the legal machinations of a youngster like Valieva and more like the stunningly awful advice of her Russian lawyers. Over the years, international athletes have offered dozens of nonsensical excuses for doping violations, from cocaine-laced anesthesia to kissing the wrong person to a tainted burrito. Grandpa’s strawberry dessert fits right in.
The very serious result of all this ridiculousness is that Valieva has been banned from December 2021 until December 2025, and her stellar performance in the team competition, which led Russia to the 2022 Olympic gold medal, has been erased.
Last week, the International Skating Union, the worldwide governing body for figure skating, reordered the Beijing Olympic results, putting the United States into first place, Japan into second and dropping Russia to third, although it appears the ISU failed to follow its own rules (and basic math) and should have put Canada into third place.
But that’s another controversy for another day, month or year. Right now, we just want to know what grandpa is fixing tonight for dessert.