Over the last few days, you’re probably heard a lot of people ask why the United States, a country that placed at least one woman on the podium at every Olympics between 1968 and 2006 — and two on three different occasions in a decade-long span starting in 1992 — isn’t winning medals in women’s-singles skating anymore. You know, a nation turns its lonely eyes to Kristi Yamaguchi and that kind of nostalgic hand-wringing.
But if that’s all we’re asking, we’re posing the wrong question, especially in light of the breaking news last week of the
failed drug test by
the sport’s latest supernova, the
15-year-old Russian Kamila Valieva. In the team event, Valieva threw her light-as-a-feather prepubescent frame into the air and became the first woman to successfully land a quadruple jump in Olympic competition to lead Russia to the gold medal (or maybe not; in view of her result from a December test, the medals have yet to be awarded). She completed four revolutions in the air in the time it takes me to type
Brava! Valieva skated in the singles event this week — despite failing a drug test in December — after she was cleared on Monday to compete by the Court of Arbitration for Sport in a ruling that casts a dark shadow over the competition. While she didn’t win a medal, still, what are the other skaters, the ones who placed below her, supposed to learn from the result? That their sport is not clean?
In reality, they probably will end up feeling the same way I did as an 18-year-old in Sochi when I finished fourth in the singles. Or as I was made to feel by all the people inside and outside the sport who expected me to literally live up to my last name: the third loser.
Now, at 26, I’m positively ancient in skating years, but with age has come hard-earned wisdom and experience that compels me to clear my throat and say this: The questions we really should be asking this week are,
Should we even want to be competitive with the Russians if it means following their troubling blueprint for success? How did we get to this point?
It’s not really women’s figure skating anymore. It’s girls’ figure skating. I know it’s not the first time people have said this; I grew up in the wake of Tara Lipinski and Michelle Kwan winning titles at 15. But while the old 6.0 judging system forced Lipinski and Kwan to be more mature, the current IJS one doesn’t allow girls to ever grow up because their womanly curves make the triple combinations and quads difficult to complete. Now it’s the Russian wonder kids’ world. Everyone else is just gulping their oxygen to try to keep up with their ever more difficult programs.
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www.nytimes.com
www.sfchronicle.com
