Kamila Valieva Banned Four Years Over 2022 Olympic Doping Case

Kamila Valieva, the teenage Russian figure skater whose positive doping test upended her sport at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, was banned from competition for four years on Monday by the top court in sports.

The punishment, announced by a three-member arbitration panel empowered by the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport, was related to a tainted sample Valieva, who was 15 at the time, gave at a competition. The positive result only emerged two months later — in the middle of the Olympics, and only a day after Valieva had led Russia to victory in the team competition.

The ban will be retroactive to Dec. 25, 2021, the arbitrators ruled, meaning it will end in 2025, just in time for Valieva to compete at the next Winter Olympics, in 2026. Now 17, she was ordered to forfeit “any titles, awards, medals, profits, prizes and appearance money” earned after her positive doping sample was collected.

Valieva had claimed that she had mistakenly taken a heart medication, Trimetazidine, prescribed for her grandfather. Russia’s anti-doping body had cleared her of any wrongdoing, not because of her reasoning for ingesting the banned substance but because of her age, saying she could not be held responsible because she was a minor at the time, and therefore a “protected person.”

The CAS panel, in Monday’s ruling, dismissed the premise that minors competing in adult competitions should be treated different from their rivals.

“There is no basis under the rules to treat them any differently from an adult athlete,” the arbitrators wrote.