Valieva’s fall from grace is complete
Doubtless there will be more where this traumatized Russian golden child came from
BEIJING A disgusted flip with her hand, as if to say the hell with it. Or maybe, goodbye to all that. Because, if history is any indicator, this might have been the last we saw of Kamila Valieva. By the time Cortina 2026 rolls around, she will be 19, long in the tooth for a Russian female figure skater, even one widely considered the greatest ever.
Even if she shone brilliantly for just a brief moment and crumbled under the glare of the Olympics, derided as a drug cheat who got away with perfidy.
Doubtless there will be more where this traumatized teenager came from.
They like them absurdly young, the poltroons of Russian figure skating. Malleable, unwitting and obediently game to train and train and train the most difficult jumps imaginable, which hardly anyone else has commanded of females. And when the scarcely pubescent girls break down, their bodies destroyed by quad-this and quad that, by triple axels — 3- 1⁄2 rotations without the takeoff boost of a toe pick, upthrust from a blade edge all in the leg muscles and spinning torso — they’re discarded.
Anna Shcherbakova, the new Olympic champion and reigning world champion, had a pair of quads in her free skate program Thursday night, and she’s the quadlite girl from Russia’s “quad squad.” Teammate Alexandra Trusova, the other 17-year-old and the silver medallist (she actually won the free skate) jammed her long routine with five quads: flip, salchow, toe, lutz and lutz again, three in a row to start the program, one of them downgraded for a step-out, two in combination, with the quad lutztriple toe the hardest combo from any figure skater at these Games, male or female.
It was a magnificent one-two podium punch for Russia. Japan’s Kaori Sakamoto claimed bronze; she was arguably the most elegant and polished of all the final flight skaters, with tremendous speed coming out of her jumps, precision in every moment, deep knees, seamless, lovely artistic interpretation, but not a triple axel in sight, nary a quad.
There was no medal for Valieva, the prodigy, the golden child, the supernova. Instead, a deep wince, misery written all over her young face, shame probably, and an eruption of sobs as her disastrous program ended, strewn with errors, jittery from start to finish, probably the longest four minutes and 20 seconds of the girl’s life.
Two hard falls, a hand down, under-rotated jumps, over-rotated jumps, a mutant back-end combination toe dryly described on the judges’ detailed score as “invalid element,” deductions on both her quads, triple axel downgraded. Just a mess.
The audience at the Capital Indoor Stadium, such as it was, could feel her pain throughout, cheering at every element accomplished, urging her on when she fell.
Valieva was fifth in the free skate and a first-place finish in Tuesday’s short program couldn’t save her from ignominy — fourth overall, out of the medals, frozen in horror in the kiss ’n’ cry as her score flashed. But she would have known, she would have seen the downfall coming as her “Bolero” program staggered from misstep to misstep, all the distress of the past week culminating in a fiasco, by her standards, never before experienced.
That’s what young Valieva will take from these Games: the taste of ashes.
No doubt there will be gloating in many parts of the figure skating universe, particularly an exceedingly hostile American media that just pounded away at the girl, without any clarity yet on how she came to have failed a drug test administered on Christmas Day at the Russian nationals, the result from a Swedish lab not registered until Feb. 7, after Valieva had already led the Russian Olympic Committee to triumph in the team event, nailing a brace of quads.
It’s a thin gruel of schadenfreude, though.
That team gold medal is in limbo — with the U.S. in the silver position and Japan the bronze — as sports authorities investigate the case, which could take months to resolve. In the interim, an expedited hearing before the Court of Arbitration for Sport had green-lit Valieva’s participation in the women’s singles competition, a decision that triggered caterwauling from all corners.
The dismay was understandable. Someone known to have tested positive for a banned drug, a medication to treat angina designated a stimulant by the World Anti-Doping Agency — it could increase endurance, which would help in relentless training sessions — had been allowed to go ahead and The CAS, the highest legal body in global sports, had decided “irreparable harm” might come to Valieva if her inclusion was taken away.
A strange decision that pleased hardly anybody. And maybe there was never a right answer, only a less wrong one. The CAS swung and missed.
As Valieva wept afterward, her teammate Shcherbakova looked angry, though it’s hard to say for sure, or about what, except that perhaps it was tainting her moment. Most of the skaters have given the Valieva scandal a wide berth, though Shcherbakova did offer a resounding defence of her embattled coach, Eteri Tutberidze, at the press conference after the short program. Tutberidze is under the microscope for her merciless drilling of her charges and is part of the entourage around Valieva that is being investigated, with suspicion the girl had been given banned drugs without understanding what she was taking.
All three of the Russian Olympic girls are from Tutberidze’s stable.
One wonders where women’s skating is headed, with a quad revolution that men’s skating went through some years ago. Maybe it will simply be expected for females to take the four-plunge, completely changing the landscape of the sport, which was the criticism when the men got all quad-crazy.
“We’re already kind of at that point,” said Madeline Schizas, Canada’s only entry in the women’s singles competition, after coming off the ice not much pleased with her performance. She doubled down a couple of triples, under-rotated a triple flip and faltered on a tag-on double toe while earning a score of 115.03 for the free, 175.56 combined, and 13th place.
“If you look at this event, a lot of people are doing triple axels, a lot of people are doing quad jumps.”
Schizas, just turned 19, has been working on an axel for the past year. She thought she almost had it last summer but set the trick aside for a while. “I didn’t think the risk was worth it to get to the Olympics for Canada. I did not need to do it. But I’m looking forward to working on that. And becoming the first Canadian woman to land one.”
The only saving grace in the final outcome of the women’s competition is that, without a podium for Valieva, there is no asterisk — as had been provisionally announced by the IOC — and no holdback on these medals.
Two Russians beaming, one Russian weeping.
It’s the broken girl we’ll remember.