GENEVA, 29 Jan: Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva was disqualified from the 2022 Olympics on Monday, almost two years after the teenager\u2019s doping case caused turmoil at the Beijing Games.
\nThe verdict from the Court of Arbitration for Sport means the Russians are set to be stripped of the gold medal in figure skating\u2019s team event. The United States finished second and is set to be named Olympic champion instead.
\nThe International Olympic Committee decided not to present any medals for the event in Beijing, where the then-15-year-old Valieva was the star performer hours before her positive test for a banned heart medicine was revealed.
\nThe case provoked legal chaos at the Beijing Olympics because Valieva\u2019s sample, taken six weeks earlier at the Russian national championships, was not notified as a positive test until Feb. 7, 2022, by a laboratory in Sweden which had staffing issues during the COVID-19 pandemic.
\nCAS said it upheld appeals led by the World Anti-Doping Agency, which asked the court to disqualify Valieva from the Olympics and ban her. A Russian sports tribunal had cleared her of any blame, citing that she was a minor.
\nThe CAS judges banned her for four years, until December 25, 2025 \u2014 about seven weeks before the next Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina d\u2019Ampezzo, Italy.
\nThe U.S. team took silver in Beijing and should be upgraded to gold. Japan took bronze and Canada placed fourth. The IOC is responsible for reallocating medals and its executive board is next scheduled to meet in March.
\n\u201cWe now anticipate the day when we can wholeheartedly celebrate these athletes, along with their peers from around the world,\u201d the U.S. Olympic body\u2019s CEO, Sarah Hirshland, said in a statement Monday.
\nThe likely new Olympic champions are Evan Bates, Karen Chen, Nathan Chen, Madison Chock, Zachary Donohue, Brandon Frazier, Madison Hubbell, Alexa Knierim and Vincent Zhou.
\nValieva\u2019s legal team said it is reviewing the CAS decision before deciding whether to appeal to the Swiss supreme court, lawyer Andrea Pinna said in a statement. Pinna, who is based in Paris, led the skater\u2019s defense at the appeal hearings in September and November.
\nAppeals to the Swiss supreme court can be made on narrow procedural grou-nds, not the merits of the case.
\nValieva\u2019s lawyers had argued she was contaminated by traces of the trimetazidine medication they said her grandfather used. She also was taking two oxygen-boosting substances that are not banned in sports.
\n\u201cHaving carefully considered all the evidence put before it,\u201d the court said in a statement, \u201cthe CAS panel concluded that Ms. Valieva was not able to establish, on the balance of probabilities and on the basis of the evidence before the panel, that she had not committed the (doping violation) intentionally.\u201d
\nThe judges decided that, according to Russian anti-doping rules, Valieva could not benefit from having been a minor at the time of the positive test. (AP)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
GENEVA, 29 Jan: Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva was disqualified from the 2022 Olympics on Monday, almost two years after the teenager\u2019s doping case caused turmoil at the Beijing Games. The verdict from the Court of Arbitration for Sport means the Russians are set to be stripped of the gold medal in figure skating\u2019s team […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-233526","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233526\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}