An international sports federation declared the U.S. the winner of the 2022 Olympic team figure skating competition and stripped the Russian Olympic Committee of its claim to the title in the wake of the disqualification of Russian teenage figure skater Kamila Valieva, providing the latest installment of a geopolitical saga that will soon enter its third year.
The wild ride for nine American figure skaters won’t end with the announcement by the International Skating Union, which can be challenged afresh by the Russian team in the same Court of Arbitration for Sport that on Monday handed down a four-year ban to Valieva for doping. Within hours of the ISU announcement, the Russian Olympic Committee said it had begun preparing documents for an appeal.
Still, the ISU’s determination is the first time anyone has assigned Team USA—even in theory—gold medals for the Beijing Winter Olympics team event. It’s a stunning upgrade for American skaters who had smarted from finishing behind Russians in the competition, and then gone without medals for two years, and one that would make Nathan Chen a double Olympic champion.
But in an acutely awkward twist, the ISU said the Russian Olympic Committee should only lose the points earned for it by Valieva—putting them in third place in the revised standings. That leaves international sports authorities with the headache of organizing a medal ceremony involving Russian athletes who are barred from participating in international competitions, restricted in which countries they can even travel to, and are seemingly unable to be comfortably in the same room as their rivals. The ISU said that Japan should be considered to have earned silver medals.
A threatened redistribution of the results is a stunning blow for a Russian sports dynasty that had prevailed in an Olympics where it was already competing under the pseudonym Russian Olympic Committee because of an earlier doping scandal, and when winning the team event ended up being a last hurrah before Russia’s most cherished athletes were locked out of international sports indefinitely over the invasion of Ukraine.
It’s also just a little bit fraught amid the worst relations between the West and Russia since the Cold War following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Russian Olympic Committee said Monday that “a war has been declared on Russian sport, and in this war, as we see, all means are allowed.” That’s mild. The head of Russia’s wrestling federation, Mikhail Mamiashvili, has previously said that Russian athletes might need to go to this summer’s Olympic Games in Paris “in tanks.”
On Tuesday, the Kremlin weighed in on the Valieva case, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying that Russia doesn’t accept the decisions and considers its athletes winners in the competition. “We are convinced that for us they will always remain Olympic champions, no matter what decisions are made in this regard, even unfair ones,” said Peskov, who is married to the 2006 Olympic ice dance champion Tatiana Navka.
In a statement, the ROC said that its appeal would “proceed from the fact that in accordance with the current, applicable ISU rules, the consequences of the decision on sanctions against an individual athlete, in this case Kamila Valieva, cannot be the basis for a review of the results of the team tournament. Our legal position is based, among other things, on the existing precedents in the Court of Arbitration for Sport practice.”
The facts of the case read like a particularly vicious law school problem—and some sports lawyers have seen a path to the ROC keeping its gold medals.
Valieva, then 15 years old, clinched a first-place finish for the Russian Olympic Committee in figure skating’s team event on Feb. 7, 2022 (and took a doping test afterward that came back clean.) Hours later, it emerged that a drug test she had taken on Dec. 25, 2021 at the Russian national championship had shown evidence of use of a banned heart drug. An Olympic medal ceremony was hastily postponed, and the outcome of the team event has been in limbo ever since.
Now, Valieva has been handed a four-year sanction, retroactive to Dec. 25, 2021, that voids all of her results after that date, including her 2022 European championships title, and fourth place finish in the individual women’s competition in Beijing. But there is a tangle of different rules that could apply to an individual skater being disqualified from the team event, in which countries with deep skating rosters put up competitors to perform a short program and a free skate in each of the four disciplines of ice dance, men’s singles, pairs, and women’s skating, and skaters earn points based on their finish in each segment relative to the other countries.
When the Court of Arbitration for Sport on Monday gave the ISU and World Anti-Doping Agency what they wanted in wiping out Valieva’s results, it said it would leave to the relevant international sports organizations to decide just how that would actually work for the team competition, where Valieva skated the short and free programs for the ROC, finishing first in both and securing 10 points for each win.
The International Olympic Committee was quick to make clear that the math wasn’t its problem, saying in a statement issued late Monday night: “The IOC is now in a position to award the medals in accordance with the ranking, which has to be established by the International Skating Union…. The IOC will contact the respective [National Olympic Committees] in order to organize a dignified Olympic medal ceremony.”
Soon after, the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee chief executive Sarah Hirshland said she had spoken with the IOC and confirmed the Americans would be in line for gold medals.
It wasn’t just a question of whether to make the other Russian squad members bear the consequences of wiping out Valieva’s contributions in the team event, although that was the biggest one in deciding who would be declared the winners. In any scenario erasing Valieva’s points from the ROC total, the U.S. would finish first and Japan second.
But to decide who would get the bronze medals, the ISU also had to determine whether to act as if nobody finished first in the women’s segments of the team competition, or if they should treat all of the other entrants as if they finished one rank higher. That seemingly arcane problem of whether Valieva’s 20 points should be vacated or redistributed mattered hugely, because the math ended up being the difference by one point between the ROC getting bronze medals—or those medals being allocated to Canada.
Skate Canada, the country’s figure skating body, said it was “extremely disappointed” by the decision, and will consider an appeal of its own.
Write to Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com and Georgi Kantchev at georgi.kantchev@wsj.com