Russian Olympic Skater in Doping Case Cleared to Compete

Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva will be allowed to continue competing at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics despite failing a drug test for trimetazidine at the start of the games that revived long-running concerns over doping by her nation’s athletes.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport said Monday that it “declines to impose a provisional suspension on the Russian figure skater,” after a nearly six-hour meeting the previous night. The International Olympic Committee, International Skating Union and World Anti-Doping Agency, which attended the meeting along with the teen skater and Russian Olympic Committee officials, had called for the reinstatement of an earlier suspension that would force the teenager to withdraw from upcoming events.

Her next event is the women’s singles competition on Tuesday. The IOC will respect the court’s decision on Valieva’s participation, spokesman Mark Adams said at a briefing Monday in Beijing. Adams added that the ruling won’t be a decider of whether she is guilty or not guilty of doping.

The heart of the controversy lies in the decision to let Valieva compete at all in the Olympics. The Russian anti-doping agency had temporarily suspended Valieva after learning she had tested positive for trimetazidine, a drug that is typically used to treat chest pain and vertigo but also can boost endurance, then reinstated her on Feb. 9. The IOC, ISU and WADA appealed that decision to the CAS.

The 15-year-old was among the ROC athletes who won gold on Feb. 7 in the team event and wowed audiences with a quad jump, the first by a woman in Olympic competition. The medals ceremony, which was due to take place the following day, has been postponed due to the investigation, and Adams said the final result is unlikely to be decided during the games. The U.S. placed second, followed by Japan and Canada.

The IOC have “lost some credibility because of the length of time that transpired after (the) sample was gathered and the lack of a clear explanation of what was up when the team event medal ceremony was postponed,” Susan Brownell, a professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who researches Chinese sports and the Olympics, said in an email.

Russian athletes are competing in Beijing under a neutral flag and under the ROC name as part of penalties imposed by WADA. An independent investigation commissioned by the agency in 2016 found that Russian sports officials oversaw a program to manipulate doping test results from 2011 to 2015, including at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi.

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