After the great fall there was a little stumble and after the stumble came the tears of a child and the fury of her rivals.
Perhaps that’s how it’s all going to be from now on for Kamila Valieva, a Russian prodigy who dropped from a cloud a week ago and has been lost in fog ever since.
She will keep on winning for as long as the courts allow her, and who knows when or if that doping sanction will arrive. But for now it looks distinctly likely that she will soon add the individual figure skating title to the team crown, if only for a while.
Kamila Valieva fought back tears after topping the leaderboard of the women’s short program
Just look at what played out on Tuesday night, when the 15-year-old recorded the worst short programme score of her season and still glided to a decent lead for Thursday’s free skate.
Even with muddled footing off her triple axel, she was strong enough to rack up 82.16, putting her clear of her team-mate Anna Shcherbakova, 17, who put in close to the best performance of her life in taking 80.20.
It’s for good reason that folk who know these things believe Valieva might just be the best there ever was. ‘Miss perfect’, they call her. But this wasn’t, not by her standards, which is one reason she may have wept when it was done.
The other cause, and more likely, is because we are seeing a young girl crushed under desperately sad circumstances.
Valieva breaks into tears as she skated off the ice to await her score in Beijing on Tuesday
It is not known what they are exactly, beyond the fact she tested positive for banned heart medication last Christmas and needed a court reprieve in the face of global fury to get on the ice on Tuesday.
Somewhere in the grey areas around all that, we might have a farcical accident or something far more sinister that would be a sordid new low, even for Russia.
Certainly the temptation is to see Valieva as a victim, though that is more likely to relate to her state’s irresistible lust for shortcuts, than the dumb luck of sharing a drinking glass with her grandfather, and thus ingesting medication he takes for an artificial heart. Remarkably, it emerged on Tuesday that such a possibility was mounted in her legal defence by her lawyer on Monday.
It has all cast the darkest shades over these Games, and from such anger came a quite extraordinary rant from the US coach Adam Rippon, whose skaters lost out on team gold to Valieva’s Russia last Monday. ‘Dirty cheaters and we are accommodating them,’ he said. ‘What this says is that the team around her are child abusers.’
She earned 82.16 points to top teammates Anna Shcherbakova and Alexandra Trusova
For her part, Valieva is saying little. She broke her silence briefly to Russian television on Tuesday morning to outline her ‘emotional fatigue’, but following the short programme, she again blitzed through a mixed zone without stopping. She also skipped her victory press conference, though by then enough had been said by others.
The other competitors, that is. The girls and women who would probably prefer to avoid inserting themselves into a controversy. But they weren’t silent, because the undertones crackled and fizzed. No one wants to point fingers directly at Valieva, but so many of them will feel this is a shambles with victims way beyond the obvious. For a start it has already been confirmed there will be no medal ceremony if Valieva finishes in the top three, meaning at least two women here will be robbed of an irreplaceable moment.
So, with that in mind, there was a recurring theme to the answers as they passed through the interview area after their routines. Take Josefin Taljegard of Sweden, as an example. ‘I think fair play is important,’ she said. ‘Something inside me thinks it’s sad. I try to be a good role model.’
All eyes were on the 15-year-old, who is at the centre of latest Russian Olympic doping scandal
Then there was the British skater, Natasha McKay.
She was 28th on Tuesday, so not in the fight as it were, and also keen to stay away from the hottest parts of the row. But when asked if she had sympathy for Valieva, she said: ‘I have sympathy for whoever will be on the podium who won’t be receiving their medals.’
And what about the Russian’s right to compete? That was put to her, too. ‘I wish it was a level playing field and it’s not.’ A good few went down that line, though one was quite sure she didn’t want to go into ‘politics’.
That was Anastasia Shabotova, a Ukrainian 16-year-old who once, aged 13, caused a row by claiming the athletes of coach Eteri Tutberidze were doping.
That was in 2019; in 2022 Tutberidze coaches Valieva. While these interviews were going on, there was some grunting protests from three stooges whose accreditation suggested they were journalists from Russia. They seemed to be of the view that this issue should be left to lie, or better still, dismissed. But it won’t, as it is already among the biggest scandals in Olympic history. By the close of play on Thursday, it is likely to be far bigger again.
Even with muddled footing off her triple axel, she was strong enough to rack up 82.16
