Held in a country known for its abuses of nature and human nature, attended by the president of a nation banned for doping but whose athletes are still allowed to compete, how could the Beijing Games not be a hot, hypocritical mess?
It didn’t take long for the latest doping drama to unfold. Medals for team figure skating, one of the first events, are still on hold as the Court of Arbitration for Sport hears the case of Russian phenom Kamila Valieva testing positive last December for trimetazidine, a banned heart medication that enhances blood flow. This is particularly significant because Valieva is a quad queen — the first woman to land a quadruple jump in Olympic competition — and she and her female quad-jumping teammates Alexandra Trusova and Anna Shcherbakova were expected to sweep the podium when the women’s figure skating competition gets underway Tuesday, Feb. 15. (The court will hear the case Sunday, Feb. 13, then announce its decision Monday, Feb. 14.)
The irony is that Valieva doesn’t need the quad or any drugs. She’s the real deal, a ballerina on ice with exquisite extensions, superb carriage, extraordinary line and the musicality of a true artist. Like many of her athletic compatriots , she has the talent, she has the training, she has the technique and she has the temperament. So why do the Russians dope? Because the name of the game is domination, sporting and geopolitical, aided by the tricky quad — four revolutions in the air — a feat better suited to the leaner, more muscular male body than the curves of the mature female one. (Valieva is a sylphlike 15 year old.)
But this discussion may ultimately prove moot. As a 15 year old, she is considered a “Protected Person” by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), too young to make an informed choice. So she could wind up with a slap on the wrist and be allowed to continue her quest for gold. Still, what a farce. Why is Russia banned for previous doping but the athletes allowed to compete under the Russian Olympic Committee banner in the first place? How is that “banned for doping”? Russian President Vladimir Putin himself even attended the opening ceremonies, standing as his athletes marched in before he went home to amass more troops and tanks at the Ukrainian border and squeeze the private parts of NATO.
That’s why it’s specious of International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach to say that the Olympics are beyond politics. That’s why it’s disingenuous for Eileen Gu, the Chinese-American skier representing China in the Olympics, to think she can straddle two diametrically opposed worlds — having her cake in China and eating it, too, in the United States as she racks up endorsements around the Pacific Rim. (She’s one of the new faces of Tiffany & Co., for whom the burgeoning Chinese luxury market is particularly important.)
We get it: Gu was raised by a Chinese mother and grandmother in San Francisco. Her connection to China is as much psychological as it is material. Other athletes find opportunities competing for foreign countries to which they have familial ties. But China isn’t Ireland. It’s a human rights abuser locked in a battle for existential supremacy with the West in general and the United States, her homeland, in particular.
Those who try to belong to two worlds usually end up belonging to neither. At some point, you have to choose. Certainly, that is the Chinese viewpoint: China doesn’t allow for dual citizenship. And Gu, a Stanford University freshman, has applied for a program open only to American citizens.
In any event, Gu seems to have made her choice: She has said she wants to inspire Chinese girls to take up freestyle skiing — which implies that they can only be inspired by someone who is Chinese. It’s fortunate that she won a gold medal in freestyle, unlike skater Beverly Zhu, who also went the Gu route, skating for China, bombing out and then having to take a heap of abuse on Weibo, Chinese Twitter.
You have to wonder how aware Gu was of IOC President Bach at the finish line of her gold-medal run with Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai, whose #MeToo accusation against a former top Chinese official led to her disappearance, reappearance and recanting of the charge. Now she’s being trotted out as a token of China’s “open-mindedness,” much like Dinigeer Yilamujiang, a skier who’s a member of China’s oppressed Uyghur minority and who was MIA a day after helping to light the Olympic flame.
In the highly political world of the Olympics, in which authoritarian countries are rewarded rather than rebuked, the line between a Gu and a Zhu, a Gu and a Peng, is as ineffable as the air into which they soar.
It’s something that Valieva will discover as well. For her, the Olympics are now a lose-lose situation. Win the arbitration case and the gold and the experience will be forever suspect, tarnished and asterisked. Lose the case and a chance at Olympic gold in both the team and the individual events, and you suspect that she will be severely reprimanded at home and sacrificed on the altar of history, yet another Iphigenia who found herself in the path of her country’s inexorable march to conquest.