International skating’s governing body on Tuesday stripped Russia of its victory in the team figure skating event at the 2022 Beijing Olympics and awarded the gold medal to the United States. The move came one day after the teenage Russian star Kamila Valieva, who had led her team to an apparent victory in the team event, was banned for four years for doping.
But rather than disqualify Russia’s team for including an ineligible skater, the governing body, the International Skating Union, adjusted the results of the competition in a way that awarded Russia the bronze medal instead.
In a statement announcing the revised results, the skating union said that it had disqualified Valieva and dismissed all the points she had accumulated. Those alterations, it said, put the United States in first, with Japan second and Russia third.
But in a curious bit of math, the I.S.U. adjusted only the final team totals for each country when it reordered the standings. By not elevating the individual points collected by each team’s women’s singles skaters at the same time, it left Canada, which had been expecting to rise to the bronze, in fourth place — a single point behind Russia.
Canada’s skating federation, which would have received the statement about the revised results in the middle of the night on Tuesday, made no immediate public comment on the I.S.U. decision.
The Russian Olympic committee, however, issued a statement in which it cast doubt on the “objectivity and impartiality” of the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which had issued the ban on Valieva, while simultaneously emphasizing that the I.S.U. had applied the rules correctly in awarding its team the bronze.
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