Column by Alexey Dospehov about the disqualification of Kamila Valieva

The story of Kamila Valieva, full of complex emotions and complex mysteries, is also notable for the fact that, using it and trying to throw these emotions into the trash, you can play an amusing game that, for example, film directors have been getting into lately. She directly asks to be “mirrored”, to be transferred to some parallel reality with the same laws, rules and concepts as in ours, but with slightly different introductory ones. The main ones, however, will remain in place.

The situation is actually easier to imagine. Everything is approximately the same as in the ill-fated February 2022 for Valieva – the Olympics, a team figure skating tournament, for the prestigious gold, given the popularity of the event, the teams of Russia and the USA are awarded. But there is a nuance. In Russia, for some reason, women’s single skating has sagged slightly: the coolest elements don’t work in isolation, as they do now. And in America, on the contrary, a miracle girl from the Michigan outback suddenly appeared – well, let’s say Sarah Smith. 15 years old, just received the right to compete in adult competitions, and already performs quadruples worse than men. A phenomenon, in general. This happens in sports from time to time.

Sarah Smith is adored by the fans and adored by the judges. And at the Olympics she brings her team the maximum 20 points, thanks to which she is slightly ahead of the Russian team. An American triumph, the heroine’s face on the covers of The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today.

Further – everything that we have already gone through. Three days pass, yielding to the persistent demands of meticulous journalists who dug everything up somewhere, the International Olympic Committee reluctantly admits: yes, the award ceremony was postponed, yes, in December, a couple of months before the Olympics, Smith had a positive test for trimetazidine, but USADA, The American Anti-Doping Agency did not suspend her, taking advantage of the athlete’s tender age and a clue in the regulations.

After that, everything was as it was for Valieva, as always happens when an incomprehensible and subtle doping story arises. Here are clumsy excuses from the side that finds itself in an awkward position about the delay in analyzing the sample (“End of December, Christmas, no one works in the laboratory, holy weekend”), and even more clumsy versions about how a doping violation could have happened, for example, about a grandfather with a heart condition who always forgets his pills on the table. Plus, of course, references to experts: “This is really funny! Why does she need trimetazidine? Is he adding momentum? And in such a tiny concentration?!”

Sarah Smith hides from the microphones, pulling a hood over her face, fails, of course, in her personal tournament, and the IOC and the rearing World Anti-Doping Agency force USADA to conduct a thorough investigation of the emergency and punish those responsible. And it drags on and on – a month, a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth… But finally the case was transferred to the Court of Arbitration for Sports, which, having also suffered, makes a verdict almost two years after the Olympics: a four-year disqualification, deprivation of all medals.

The imagination of a person who has been closely following what is happening in sports over the last ten years will instantly draw a reaction to the verdict – both the American one and the reaction of those who, thanks to him, received Olympic gold. And if anyone thinks that the Russian one would be no different from the one that followed the punishment of Kamila Valieva – with “spitting in the face”, “fanaticism” and “hands off the girl who is not guilty of anything”, that in it would have sounded a touching note of sadness over the fact that one will have to accept an undeserved prize, as if it does not even exist in a parallel, in some kind of “perpendicular” universe with mercy and compassion reigning everywhere in it. There is a suspicion that in a universe with laws and concepts identical to ours, even today’s pretentious American “triumph of justice” regarding the disqualification of Valieva and the redistribution of Beijing spoils, domestic officials and functionaries, commenting on the disqualification of Sarah Smith, would prefer harsher and more assertive expressions, since 2016, when hackers, having hacked the WADA database, found out the truth about therapeutic exceptions for some stars of the US team, they happily joked about the appearance of gymnast Simone Biles, who collected a stack of gold medals at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro: “A pumped-up man with no neck” . Neither Biles’ young age, nor the fact that the exceptions were issued completely legally, nor the dubious usefulness of psychotropic drugs for increasing muscle mass and the number of turns on the uneven bars, bothered anyone.

However, there is no escape from the suspicion that in a universe with laws and concepts identical to ours—and most importantly, with an identical geopolitical situation—the sanctions for a symbolic dose of trimetazidine for an American girl prodigy would be much milder. At least my career wouldn’t be ruined.

Alexey Dospehov