Skater Kamila Valieva receives a four-year ban for doping | Sports

Russian skater Kamila Valieva, whose positive doping test shook the Beijing 2022 Winter Games, was sentenced to four years of suspension, which begins to count from December 25, 2021, the Arbitral Tribunal announced on Monday of sport (TAS).

The results of the 17-year-old prodigy, who was initially not sanctioned by the Russian Anti-Doping Agency because she was considered to have committed “no fault or negligence”, will not count from the date on which the sanction intervenes. in force, he added, of the CAS, the highest court in world sport. This means that medals and titles won since will be cancelled.

It all started at the Beijing Winter Games in February 2022, when it was learned that Valieva, then aged 15, had tested positive for trimetazidine, a banned substance, during a test carried out two months earlier. When the news broke, Valieva had already won Olympic team gold, and as the matter was still unresolved, she was able to continue competing, later finishing fourth in the individual final.

The Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) decided to provisionally suspend Valieva, but the athlete appealed to the agency’s disciplinary commission, which later confirmed her request. Then, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) had to make a first decision on the case, after receiving resources from the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the International Skating Federation (ISU). , against the position of RUSADA.

The court authorized the skater to continue the competition, finding that preventing her participation would cause “irreparable harm” to a protected person, because she was under 16 years old. The athlete alleged in his defense that the trimetazidine found in his urine came from accidental contamination with a drug with which his grandfather treated angina.

After the Beijing Games, RUSADA acquitted the athlete, a decision which WADA appealed to the CAS and requested a four-year sanction, with the withdrawal of the medal she had obtained in Beijing and the annulment of its results from December 2022. The ISU also requested the CAS to annul the decision of RUSADA, to sanction the athlete with a period of suspension that the court itself determined, in addition to the cancellation of all its results. This led to the athlete’s four-year sanction, announced this Monday by the CAS.

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