Kamila Valieva will remember the Olympics – Newspaper Kommersant No. 196 (7397) of 10/21/2022

This weekend, the season starts in Russian figure skating, which, like most other sports, is in total isolation. It will be opened at the Moscow Megasport arena by the first stage of the domestic Grand Prix series, which is a complete analogue of the foreign one and runs according to the same scheme. The main intrigue is traditionally associated with the women’s tournament, in which two students of Eteri Tutberidze will clash – Kamila Valieva, who will enter the competitive ice for the first time after the doping scandal that occurred at the Beijing Olympics, and another super junior Sofya Akatieva.

The starting stage of the Grand Prix in figure skating, which will be held this weekend at the Megasport Palace, will be the first major competition for Russians this season. It will open a series organized by the Russian Figure Skating Federation (FFKR) especially for domestic skaters left without international starts. It is as close as possible to the original Grand Prix series, which has been occupying the first half of the competitive calendar for many years in a row, and includes six stages in various Russian cities with a final. The leaders of the team turned out to be divided into stages in such a way that before the final, where the strongest in each discipline will go, they did not intersect in any way.

Only two athletes from the first echelon appear in the women’s application for the first stage, and both train under the guidance of Eteri Tutberidze: the Olympic champion in the team tournament, 16-year-old Kamila Valieva, and the talented 15-year-old Sofia Akatieva. It is noteworthy that if the season had developed according to the usual scenario, then both of these skaters would most likely not have been able to enter the adult competitive ice. But for different reasons.

The fact is that the process around Kamila Valieva, launched at the height of the February Olympics in Beijing, has not yet come to an end. Recall that after the victory in the Russian national team at the Olympic team tournament, it became known that the December doping test of the athlete gave a positive result for the banned drug trimetazidine. By the decision of the exit panel of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), Valieva was admitted to individual competitions, but there, unable to cope with the pressure, she “fell off” and became only the fourth. Although the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) in mid-September announced the completion of the investigation into the Valieva case, its results have not yet been made public. Obviously, if it were not for the sanctions, as a result of which all Russians were suspended from competitions, Valieva’s participation in international competitions until the end of the proceedings would have been a big question.

Sofya Akatieva would also not have made it to adult international competitions because of her too young age. Now that the International Skating Union (ISU) has tightened the age limit from 15 to 17 years old, she can count on entering the adult league only in the 2025/26 season. However, even before the introduction of this reform, Akatieva would have been sitting in juniors for another year: she turned 15 on July 7, and only those who overcame this age mark before July 1 are allowed to compete. The FFKR refused to support the trend towards increasing the age and, on the contrary, lowered the bar, allowing 14-year-olds to enter major competitions.

There is no obvious favorite in this confrontation. Sofya Akatieva, like all Tutberidze’s pre-pubertal students, is very well versed from a technical point of view and will aim at ultra-si elements – quadruple jumps and a triple axel. Her second estimate, however, still lags behind the first.

With Kamila Valieva, everything is exactly the opposite. The athlete, who last season collected the titles of the champion of Russia and Europe and was considered the undisputed number one of the national team, grew up during the off-season, gained weight and lost quadruple jumps. At the September test skates, in any case, Valieva performed without them. But the skater is able to compensate for the lack of ultra-complex jumps with high scores for the components – the interpretation of music, gliding, expressiveness, and so on.

Valieva’s new number, which caused conflicting assessments from experts, will probably become the highlight of the competition program. In it, the figure skater portrays herself and reproduces the events that happened to her at the Beijing Games. First, there is a textual news section, and in the final, the skater puts a black hood on her head – this is a reference to the moment when Valieva, passing through the mixed zone, tried to hide from journalists who asked her about doping in this way.

In the rest of the genres, meanwhile, there is one clear leader each, who, in the absence of blunders, should win. So, for example, in sports pairs this is the duet of Evgeny Tarasov and Vladimir Morozov, who took silver medals at the Olympics, and in men – long-term leader Mikhail Kolyada.

Ekaterina Remizova