The Olympics: Enabling Russian doping—again
Russian skater Kamila Valieva “performs so effortlessly that she appears born to do it,” said Juliet Macur in The New York Times. But in “one of the biggest scandals in recent Olympic history,” the 15-year-old tested positive for trimetazidine, a banned heart medication that athletes have used to increase blood flow and stamina. Valieva’s positive test in December was revealed only after she totally dominated the team competition last week, with a sublime, balletic performance highlighted by two quadruple jumps—the first quads ever landed by a woman in competition. Citing a provision that protects minors, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) let her continue to compete, though the International Olympic Committee (IOC) ruled that if Valieva wins events, there will be no medals ceremony. China’s Zhu Yi called this tortured ruling “completely unfair,” said Jay Busbee and Henry Bushnell in Yahoo! Sports, while retired U.S. skater Ashley Wagner said it was proof that athletes “are competing under two different systems.”
Don’t blame Valieva—blame Russia, said Barry Svrluga in The Washington Post. During the Sochi Olympics in 2014, Russian athletic and intelligence officials ran a massive doping program involving dozens of competitors, whose dirty urine was removed through a hole in the wall of a lab and swapped for clean samples. “Russia was never properly punished” for that enormous scandal, with the CAS lowering Russia’s fouryear Olympic ban to two and letting athletes compete as “neutral” members of the Russian Olympic Committee. Valieva “will pay a public and painful price” for this latest cheating scandal, said Tara Sullivan in The Boston Globe, but the shame should fall on the IOC for its cowardice, and on Valieva’s coach, Eteri Tutberidze. She’s infamous for putting prepubescent girls through a meat grinder to turn them into Olympic athletes, with training regimens that often leave them burned out or badly injured within three years.
A terrible stain has been left on these already tainted Games, said Christine Brennan in USA Today. One of the best performers was caught cheating, yet the CAS and IOC let her continue to compete, while denying a medals ceremony to those who competed against her. “What a slap in the face” for every athlete who competed clean— and for the Olympic movement itself. In Beijing, “the Olympic Games lost. Cheating won. The bad guys won.”