When laid out on paper, it makes perfect sense that someone with gymnastics as a favorite summer sport would have figure skating as their winter viewing of choice. Both sports prioritize combining complicated, dangerous skills with some degree of elegance and expression, both sports’ fans and competitors love to argue about that particular degree of elegance and expression, both sports have incredible competitors who made the sport their entire life and who redefine greatness with every competition – and both sports have long, sordid histories of abuse.
The Kamila Valieva saga over this last week brought back nothing so much as the sinking pit in my stomach generated by everything that happened with USA Gymnastics. On the surface, the two situations could not be more different. Kamila Valieva tested positive for a banned substance with no therapeutic exemption and is now subject to the kind of suspicion and doubt that never truly goes away. USA Gymnastics enabled abusers of all varieties to use the elite and pre-elite gymnastics field as their own personal playground. The similarities come when we step away from the specifics, though, and look at the bigger picture, allowing our eyes to slide slightly out of focus as if trying to find that image in the Magic Eye cacophony.
The true commonality is this: What are we willing to do to win? For a long time, in the US, gold medals came at the expense of young women’s lives and safety. We turned a blind eye to what, in hindsight, was so clearly a damaged system, because we wanted to see five smiling faces on top of the podium (and then we wanted to yell at them for not putting a hand over their heart, as if they weren’t thankful enough to a nation that would see them preyed upon). We watched fluff pieces praising the coaches who forced athletes to tumble on broken bones, who scoffed at injury, and who played favorites with the only intention being to create an atmosphere of mistrust, rather than solidarity.
If, before this week, you only knew of Eteri Tutberidze and Sambo 70 through international sports media and commentary, you likely had an impression of the miracle-worker coach and her prodigy students, all achieving things beyond the commonly understood boundaries of the sport. “Revered but controversial” read one headline promoted on Twitter, a reductive but succinct demonstration of the general public’s opinion towards Tutberidze. Headlines like this have been around every Olympic cycle going back to 2014, when 15-year-old Yulia Lipnitskaya stunned everyone in the Team Event in Sochi, every one of them not interrogating the narrative any further than the “fearsome work ethic” and rags-to-riches story of the Russian skating queen-maker.
Under the surface of “we spent a week at Sambo-70 and look at all these baby quad queens!” though, lies a darker story. Even if we put aside the positive test for a banned substance with no use in a 15-year-old athlete other than to increase aerobic capacity, there are the threads of a tale of a coach willing to treat young athletes as disposable. Lipnitskaya, hailed by every English-language outlet as the next great Olympic champion, was out of the sport by age 19 and struggled with an eating disorder. Perhaps relatedly, Tutberidze gave interviews praising how Lipnitskaya could survive on only “powdered nutrients.” Evgenia Medvedeva, the next hailed queen of skating, competed with a stress fracture in PyeongChang 2018 and came in second to Alina Zagitova, who, in turn, has not competed since 2019.
To be frank, I could keep going with the list of skaters Tutberidze coached who burned bright and flamed out. It’s long, and depressing, and if you have any feeling at all, makes you want to give the sport up for lost.
That’s not the answer, though. It’s not the answer in gymnastics and it’s not the answer here. The answer here is accountability -- both on the part of federations, of coaches, and of us, the media and the fans. We have to be better about asking questions: Yes, these quads are amazing, but are the athletes performing them learning them safely and in a way that won’t ruin the rest of their life (which is usually much longer than their sporting career?) Yes, we want to see even more high-flying tumbling and amazing skills from our gymnasts, but can we guarantee that without the added pressure of a system where failure means humiliation, and no amount of success can protect you?
I joke sometimes that my habit of becoming so invested in a sport that I learn all the dirty little secrets keeps me from actually enjoying anything, ever, but the truth is a little more complicated than that. At its best, this sport is one that marries performance and exceptional athleticism. How can one not be drawn in by that? We know that it can be coached at a high level with respect for the athletes, because we have seen it happen. Sometimes, loving something means knowing it can be better, and being that noisy person who tries, even with a tiny platform and a small voice, to extort it to become what it could be.
Where does that leave us today? I don’t know.
It leaves us with an Olympic women’s competition that feels a bit like a joke. If Valieva wins, there will be no medal ceremony, no flowers, no acknowledgment of an achievement that the IOC, WADA, and many other skating federations feel will be nullified in the coming months. If she doesn’t win, blame will be placed on the drama surrounding the previous week -- and scrutiny will fall on her teammates, fellow Tutberidze students who are the most likely medallists, thanks to their technical components. Other skaters will surely be wondering why the rules feel so different this time when in the past, suspensions have not been lifted until skaters could prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that contamination came from an outside source (such as US Pairs skater Jessica Calalang, who couldn’t compete for eight months while waiting for WADA/USADA to clear her for testing positive for a metabolite caused by her makeup).
The fact that Valieva is 15 is being given as the reason for the lifting of her suspension, here. Other athletes whose suspensions have been enforced were above the age of 16, the age where according to WADA regulations someone is responsible for their own behavior and positive drug tests. That just leads us to another question: Why is 15 the senior age in skating? Why is it that someone can compete as an adult and yet not be held to adult rules and regulations? Why is it that in both sports, there is still such a dedication to the outdated ideals of push-push-push until you can’t? Why does it take the greatest athlete in the history of the sport refusing to put herself in danger to create the tiniest bit of change?
At the end of the day, it all comes down to this: It isn’t fair. The Olympic Movement is built on this ideal of fair competition, fair sport bringing the world together. This incident in particular, and the greater demonstration of disregard for universally adhered-to regulations regarding the amount of outside assistance available to athletes, undermines all of that. The house built on sand cannot stand, and an undertow is eating away its foundations -- and they are letting it fall.
It isn’t fair to Kamila Valieva, who went from being “the first woman to land a quad at the Olympics” to “another doping Russian athlete,” at an age where most of us weren’t deemed mature enough to drive a car. It isn’t fair to every other competitor in the women’s event, who now has to wonder exactly how real every competition they saw swept up by the ROC athletes was. It isn’t fair to whoever else medals, to have their Olympic moment taken away from them thanks to something they didn’t do. It isn’t fair to every 13-year-old girl in both Russia and other countries, breaking her body in search of something that might not even be achievable without untoward help.
It could be fair. I still believe that. I still believe that with a few changes, with a few people held responsible, it could be fair. It just isn’t right now, and that makes it hard to enjoy.
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