Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva, whose positive doping test rocked the 2022 Beijing Winter Games, has been sentenced to a four-year ban starting December 25, 2021, the Court of Arbitration for Sport said on Monday (TAS).
The results of the 17-year-old prodigy, who was initially not sanctioned by the Russian Anti-Doping Agency because it was considered that she had committed “no fault or negligence,” will not be taken into account from the date the sanction came into force, he added. The CAS, the highest jurisdiction in world sport. This means that medals and titles acquired since then will be cancelled.
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It all started at the Beijing Winter Games in February 2022, when it was revealed that Valieva, then 15, had tested positive for trimetazidine, a banned substance, in a test taken two months earlier. When the news broke, Valieva had already won Olympic team gold and, with the case still unresolved, was able to continue competing, later placing 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 upheld her claim. Then the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) had to make an initial decision in the case after receiving resources from the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the International Skating Federation (ISU). , in contrast to the RUSADA position.
The court allowed the figure skater to continue competing because preventing her participation would cause “irreparable harm” to a protected person who is under 16 years old. The athlete claimed in her defense that the trimetazidine found in her urine was due to accidental contamination with a drug used by her grandfather to treat angina.
After the Beijing Games, RUSADA acquitted the athlete, a decision against which WADA appealed to CAS and requested a four-year sanction, with the withdrawal of the medal won in Beijing and the annulment of her results from December 2022. The ISU also requested that TAS demanded to annul the RUSADA decision to punish the athlete with a suspension period set by the court itself, in addition to the annulment of all her results. This led to a four-year sanction against the athlete, announced by CAS on Monday.
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