A panel of three arbitrators for the top court in sports on Monday ruled that Kamila Valieva, the teenage Russian Olympian whose positive doping test upended the figure skating competition at the 2022 Beijing Winter Games, had been banned from competition for four years.
The punishment, announced by a three-member panel empowered by the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport, will be retroactive to Dec. 25, 2021. That is the date Valieva, who was 15 at the time, provided a tainted sample at a competition only months before the Olympics. The ban will end in 2025, just in time for her to compete at the next Winter Olympics, in 2026.
She was ordered to forfeit “any titles, awards, medals, profits, prizes and appearance money” earned after her positive doping sample was collected.
The decision, almost two years after the end of the Beijing Games, is the final twist in a yearslong fight that wove together threads familiar to followers recent Olympics: athletic greatness, Russian doping, bitter accusations and whispers of coverups. But at its heart the case highlighted the inability of global sports to enforce their rules on doping and to punish athletes and countries in a timely manner.
The court’s ruling should have consequences for other skaters. Because Valieva took part in the team event, Russia could be stripped of its first-place finish, with the victory awarded to the United States team that finished second in Beijing.
The results of that event had been one of the more contentious points of the Games. With no clarity on Valieva’s status, no medal ceremony was held — the first time in Olympic history that medals were not awarded in a completed event. That meant all the teams left China without their moment on the podium, or their medals.
