Valieva’s drug case continues.
She was found to have had the banned heart drug trimetazidine in her system several weeks before the Olympics. Later, according to documents from her hearing with arbitrators this week, it was found that Valieva had two other drugs in her system. Both of those are used by athletes to increase endurance but are not banned.
Valieva was cleared to compete in the women’s individual event just a day before it began with the short program on Tuesday.
According to an interview on Russia’s Channel One, the state-run TV station, she said she hadn’t slept at all on Sunday night after spending seven hours in a hearing with a panel of arbitrators considering her participation in these Games. In the end, the panel decided that barring her from competition would cause her “irreparable harm.”
“I’m happy but emotionally I’m tired, so this is tears of happiness, I think, mixed with a bit of sorrow,” she told Channel One. “But I’m surely happy to be at the Olympic Games and to try to represent our country, and I hope I will fully focus and demonstrate my results.”
This had been her goal since she was just a young girl growing up in Kazan, a city about 450 miles east of Moscow. And it was what she deemed possible even in those early years of skating when she rose quickly in the sport, pegged as a natural.
Years ago, a tiny Valieva dressed in a tiny white costume, straight out of “Swan Lake,” glided across the rink doing her tiny jumps and moving her body with a dancer’s soft arm positions and elastic legs. Even at that age, she moved so gracefully to the music that the notes seemed programmed into her DNA.
But on Thursday, she was a different Kamila Valieva, one whose name will forever be synonymous with one of the biggest doping controversies in Olympic history — the exact opposite of a little girl’s dream.
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