2022 Olympic FS Team Event delayed medal ceremony - updates

[MacMadame]

She still is entitled to another test of the B sample which hasn't happened yet.

Because she hasn't requested it.

The circumstances were that this test was taken in December and she had not received the results until the Olympics. She had competed in Euros and passed a drug test, and she was already in Beijing and participated in the Team competition and passed a drug test there as well. She was already competing and had taken and passed drug tests. The test wasn't handled in a timely fashion and this was not the normal situation.

This is not really true. This kind of situation -- where someone fails a test but the results don't come back until they compete somewhere -- has happened before and will happen again. It's quite possible that the results of the test at Nationals wouldn't come back before Euros as they took place before the 1/20 deadline. And in other sports where the athletes compete every week, it happens even more often. Especially these days with Covid making lots of things take longer.

 

[Coco]

I thought the whole point of letting her compete after the positive result from December was reported was because when that December positive result was fully adjudicated, the penalty would have started from the date of the December test and may have been fully served prior to either Olympic event she competed in.

It seems as though RUSADA is refusing to reach a decision.

 

[MacMadame]

I thought the whole point of letting her compete after the positive result from December was reported was because when that December positive result was fully adjudicated, the penalty would have started from the date of the December test and may have been fully served prior to either Olympic event she competed in.

That wasn't what their ruling said. It may be that was what they had in mind but their ruling was that she would be irreparably harmed by not being able to compete and there wasn't time between the report of the drug test and the competition to go through the process to determine what would happen to her.

 

[kwanfan1818]

The CAS mini-committee also claimed that, while specific language regarding minors was explicit in one section, and not written in another, they could apply the explicit language to where it was not written , even though the people that wrote the rules argued that if they meant the language to apply across the board, they would have written it that way.

 

[Trillian]

The CAS decision to let Valieva compete in the individual event is irrelevant here because there are no medals in question there. She had already competed in the team event before the positive drug test came back, so the only way to avoid a mess there would have been not drugging children in the first place.

At this point, since the athletes didn’t get their medal ceremony at the Olympics, I don’t see the point in skipping procedural steps. Nobody has a time machine. Valieva’s two subsequent negative tests will be irrelevant to the conversation because we don’t play “best two out of three” with doping. RUSADA will “investigate” the circumstances of the December test, do whatever they think is appropriate, their action will almost certainly be appealed, and eventually we’ll have a conclusion. There’s a limit to how much any of it can be rushed.

 

[Sylvia]

On a positive note , USFS/Team USA held a celebration ceremony yesterday in San Jose, CA (after the Stars on Ice show) for the U.S. Olympic team figure skaters - here's what Karen Chen posted (photos #3-5): https://www.instagram.com/p/Cd6eqqGvQie/
"last night. these people. & mvp to whoever gave me napkins to wipe all my tears during the Order of Ikkos medal speeches for our beloved coaches. "