In my last post, I wrote that short of a meltdown, embattled Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva was a shoo-in for the gold medal in the women’s free skate Thursday, Feb. 17.
Later I thought the better of it and said to myself, “I bet she finishes fourth.”
Yeah.
Valieva finished fourth behind Russian Olympic Committee teammates Anna Shcherbakova (gold) and Alexandra Trusova (silver) and Japan’s Kaori Sakamoto,(bronze), thus ensuring that there would be an Olympic medals ceremony in women’s figure skating. (Had Valieva made the podium, there would’ve been no such ceremony, pending an ongoing investigation into her testing positive for the banned heart medication trimetazidine.
Not a conspiracy theorist here, but who didn’t think that it was awfully convenient for the ROC that a girl who had been popping up in the air in effortless quadruple jumps suddenly imploded, thereby still giving the ROC two medals in the event. Certainly, the women I dine with regularly on Thursday night said it was the first thing that crossed their minds when they heard the shocking but not surprising news that Valieva finished off the podium.
“Why did you stop fighting?” her coach, Eteri Tutberidze, asked immediately after she came off the ice. “Explain it to me, why? You let it go after that axel.”
Of course, Tuberidze will have her own explaining to do about why one of her charges wound up testing positive for a banned drug. Her hypercritical comments coming moments after Valieva’s meltdown on the ice could have been part of the fix, orchestrated to distance the ROC from any suggestion that it had set Valieva up as the fall guy. (But then, the ROC did set Valieva up to fail, didn’t it — putting her in the situation in which she finds herself and then coldly abandoning her to her tears in the kiss-and-cry area. Even oblivious International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach — who bears much of the responsibility for this mess — said he found scenes of Valieva weeping in the arms of a male coach as Tuberidze watched emotionless “chilling.”
Meanwhile, the subdued gold medalist sat alone, clutching a stuffed animal; the fired-up silver medalist sobbed, later telling the press that poor judging cost her the gold; and the bronze medalist shed tears as well, not so much out of joy but from relief that the pressure was now over. Such a happy scene.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport had ruled that not letting Valieva skate, even under a cloud of suspicion, would cause the minor “irreparable harm.” How did that work out for you, CAS?
On the slopes, there was no joy in Mudville either as Alpine skier Michaela Shiffrin, a woman with 73 World Cup wins, bombed out of the slalom portion of the downhill combined, her last chance for an individual medal in the Beijing Games.
Afterward, Shiffrin was as hard on herself as social media was, but really she was a victim of a different kind of psychological stress. She lost her father — her coach and her North Star — 10 months ago. And while the mind may have adjusted, unconsciously the heart and body haven’t.
Time: It is, Tennessee Williams noted at the end of his play “The Glass Menagerie,” “the longest distance between two places.” In time, Shiffrin will be in a different, better place about her father’s death and her Beijing experience, one in which grief can be engaged without the raw emotions that originally attended it.
In time, Valieva, too, will be able to look back on her experience in Beijing with perspective. But she will always be the face of games that were held in a country that is a human rights abuser, attended by her president, Vladimir Putin, who’s amassing troops at the Ukrainian border even as we speak.
What begins in falsity can only end in tragedy.
Say it ain’t so, Kamila. Say it ain’t so.