Russian Figure Skater tests positive for drugs - delays ceremony for team medals

[Willin]

One thing that can and should be done for a lot of reasons is lowering the insane cost of American colleges. And taking athletic accomplishment out of the admissions equation.

So many parents push their kids hard in sports to get an athletic scholarship and/or a leg up on admissions. I’m sorrier, in general, for the inner city and rural kids being hammered on the football field than for the generally more privileged skaters, although the abuse the latter too often suffer is no joke. But looking at how many formerly elite skaters are attending Ivy League schools, I have a sneaking suspicion that as hard as elite skating is, it is sometimes a means to an end.

It is definitely that for a lot of parents, especially recently. There's a reason you see so many US Senior skaters mysteriously retire or get worse results after they turn 18 or 19.

But isn't that also what it's like in Russia? In Russia skating can be your ticket to the upper echelons of society: money, luxury cars, modeling for luxury brands and high end magazines, admission to the college of your choice, TV appearances, getting friends in high places... It's no wonder the parents don't fight the doping or oppressive coaching regardless of culture. Plenty of US parents do it of their own volition.

 

[MacMadame]

Raise your hand if you were surprised with the drug test result.

I was.

I don't think you can "control children" as in, you can't exactly tell a child younger than 17 "well you're extremely talented at skating, but I am not allowing you to show your talent off before you reach the age of 17. It doesn't matter if these opportunities exist and some of them will even fetch you money". That will ALSO cause psychological harm.

Of course, you can control children. Parents do it all the time. When my kids were little, one of the ways I controlled them was to not let them sign up for more than one activity at a time. I also controlled them by how much I was willing to spend on their extra-curricular activities and also by what schools I registered them at (or if I homeschooled them), what town I lived in, how much allowance I gave them, what activities I would chauffer them to, and a host of other decisions I made as a parent to a minor.

Did I say to my daughter?

well you're extremely talented at acting, but I am not allowing you to show your talent off before you reach the age of 17. It doesn't matter if these opportunities exist and some of them will even fetch you money

No. Both because that would be a weird thing to say to her, but also because that's not how I thought of it. I thought of it as "acting can be very damaging to women, let alone little kids so I'm not going to enable my kid to pursue it professionally until she was both older and also had done certain things to show she can handle it."

Btw, it's not a black-and-white, either-or situation. It's quite possible to encourage your kids to pursue something they are talented at without pushing them to be professional or at the elite level when they are very young. I've lost track of the $$ I spent, the time I put in (chauffering and volunteering), and the sacrifices I made to let my kid explore her passion for acting. I just didn't pull up the family and move to LA to get her an agent and start auditioning when she asked at age 14.

I know some people have this idea that if your kid shows extreme talent in an area that parents have to do everything in their power to encourage it. But you don't. It's a choice.

You're also Asian. I don't think I need to expound on it too much.

JFC

And I will again bring the academic example up - are you willing to tell someone very talented at science and mathematics olympiads to not put themselves through all the psychological torture and self-flagellating? I don't think so.

Then you think wrong. Plenty of parents would not push a kid to keep doing that to the point of "psychological torture and self-flagellating" including myself.

But isn't that also what it's like in Russia? In Russia skating can be your ticket to the upper echelons of society: money, luxury cars, modeling for luxury brands and high end magazines, admission to the college of your choice, TV appearances, getting friends in high places... It's no wonder the parents don't fight the doping or oppressive coaching regardless of culture. Plenty of US parents do it of their own volition.

And pay for it too.

 

[VGThuy]

Then you were lucky. You know full well there are many others who weren't. Much like there are many in sports who are lucky, many who aren't. Why focus only on those who weren't so lucky, and punish the rest?

Get my own reasoning now?

I don’t understand your argument anymore. I didn’t say take away all activities from children. I said the elite sport track where we put adult-level expectation and attention towards minors and expect them to make adult decisions needs to be looked at and see if it’s healthy. I don’t get what my message about encouraging a system where we can reward academic excellence without inducing “psychological torture” (a term you used that I took seriously) and allowing children to “self-flagellate” without offering them help and support means that I want to punish children or take away opportunities. We can reshape how we provide opportunities and look for healthy solutions…and maybe encourage new ways of thinking about success and maybe even provide even better pipelines than we currently have.

And I also somehow missed the “You’re Asian” part of your initial response to me, so I’ll be taking my leave from this conversation now. I don’t think this conversation is being conducted in good faith any longer.

 

[On My Own]

Then you think wrong. Plenty of parents would not push a kid to keep doing that to the point of "psychological torture and self-flagellating" including myself.

The point, that you missed in the post later and within that conversation, is that many parents who let their kids participate in sports ALSO don't necessarily let their kids do sports to the point of torture, and that many coaches ALSO don't abuse their athletes. So no, for me, it would be very wrong to not let children participate in sports.

Of course, ...

I know some people have this idea that if your kid shows extreme talent in an area that parents have to do everything in their power to encourage it. But you don't. It's a choice.

So thank you, here, for being an example who wouldn't push your own child severely.

JFC

You want to deny this happens among Asians quite a ton or what? lol. Do tell me more, I'd love to hear it.

 

[On My Own]

And I also somehow missed the “You’re Asian” part of your initial response to me, so I’ll be taking my leave from this conversation now. I don’t think this conversation is being conducted in good faith any longer.

I'm very sorry. I'll edit the post and remove that part.

 

[On My Own]

I don’t understand your argument anymore. I didn’t say take away all activities from children. I said the elite sport track where we put adult-level expectation and attention towards minors and expect them to make adult decisions needs to be looked at and see if it’s healthy. I don’t get what my message about encouraging a system where we can reward academic excellence without inducing “psychological torture” (a term you used that I took seriously) and allowing children to “self-flagellate” without offering them help and support means that I want to punish children or take away opportunities.

You don't need to participate, but my argument was based off my understanding of your post, that 17 year olds don't necessarily have the psychological capacity to deal with all the expectations thrown at them in elite sports. Maybe, I misunderstood and thought you meant they shouldn't be allowed to participate in elite sports until that age.

So I was trying to say that academic environments where one works towards scholarships can also be equally unhealthy for young students, and we wouldn't want those taken away from us just because they can be unhealthy as well.

We can reshape how we provide opportunities and look for healthy solutions…and maybe encourage new ways of thinking about success and maybe even provide even better pipelines than we currently have.

Well, I won't deny we can do better. However, it's theoretical to me. It's why I was bringing up the mass consumership and how it affects children initially. I don't think what you're saying here is easy or possible, because money does define success currently, a lot of the times. Maybe, we can say the parents push their children to earn money for them though.

Even when money doesn't define success, I think social pressure can be huge to make "correct" choices and be the best you can be in a field that is recognized by society.

 

[VGThuy]

Thank you for clarifying. I don't pretend to have all the answers and I'm far from being qualified from being the one to propose anything. I do think that greatness doesn't have to come from trauma, being humble doesn't have to come from extreme hardship, and we don't need to be overly exploitative or abusive to foster talent and for success to follow. I use those words for a reason as you can't keep them away from hardship and obstacles. That's normal and they should face stress and learn how to deal with it healthily. But stress is not the same thing a "psychological torture" and having ambition and heightened expectations doesn't mean you allow an environment for children to adopt self-flagellating tendencies. For my own children, all I can do is expose them to different things, use my best judgment if one of them gets really good at something, and make sure they have a bigger picture view of things to let them know they'll be ok if they want to quit because it becomes seriously unhealthy for them to continue to pursue things. We all, hopefully, have a long life, and nothing is worth life-long emotional scars and physical ailments.

 

[overedge]

It definitely won't. All it means is that that same abuse will happen with less spotlight.

I do support the age limit, but I also recognize crazy stage parents are in it for the long haul - college sports in the US is the perfect example. You can't compete in college sports until 18, and yet parents/coaches start the crazy training as young as 3-4 to make sure they're competitive and ready for that level of competition. There's articles and documentaries on how crazy the training is for some of the NCAA hopefuls.

I think it would have more impact to rework the funding and reward systems so that medals aren't the only things that are valued as measures of accomplishment. Many federations could do a lot better in this regard, and focus on the hard work that all of the athletes are doing to be able to compete at that level, not just "yay, we won a medal". See the quote from Kaitlin Hawayek in my sig below.

And adjust the scoring systems so that it's not just underage highly flexible doped-up kids that can get maximum points.

 

[MacMadame]

So no, for me, it would be very wrong to not let children participate in sports.

But no one argued that. It's elite sports that we are talking about here and that all the examples are from.

 

[DreamSkates]

I was.


Of course, you can control children. Parents do it all the time. When my kids were little, one of the ways I controlled them was to not let them sign up for more than one activity at a time. I also controlled them by how much I was willing to spend on their extra-curricular activities and also by what schools I registered them at (or if I homeschooled them), what town I lived in, how much allowance I gave them, what activities I would chauffer them to, and a host of other decisions I made as a parent to a minor.

Did I say to my daughter?

No. Both because that would be a weird thing to say to her, but also because that's not how I thought of it. I thought of it as "acting can be very damaging to women, let alone little kids so I'm not going to enable my kid to pursue it professionally until she was both older and also had done certain things to show she can handle it."

Btw, it's not a black-and-white, either-or situation. It's quite possible to encourage your kids to pursue something they are talented at without pushing them to be professional or at the elite level when they are very young. I've lost track of the $$ I spent, the time I put in (chauffering and volunteering), and the sacrifices I made to let my kid explore her passion for acting. I just didn't pull up the family and move to LA to get her an agent and start auditioning when she asked at age 14.

I know some people have this idea that if your kid shows extreme talent in an area that parents have to do everything in their power to encourage it. But you don't. It's a choice.


JFC


Then you think wrong. Plenty of parents would not push a kid to keep doing that to the point of "psychological torture and self-flagellating" including myself.


And pay for it too.

Well said. A wise parent will learn who the child is, and what is healthy for that child. Fame and fortune are not always beneficial to children or adults. Children and their parents may "pay" for that fame and fortune in many ways and with many regrets. Fame and fortune are not all they are "cracked up to be." We could discuss many examples of children who have felt, or been, abused because of perceived talent. And ended up with serious depression, drug problems, etc.

Added: I couldn't live with myself if I pushed my child so that I could also have some luxury.

 

[Marco]

I'm not letting Kamila off the hook, especially as the ordeal turned into a "poor me" LP, but it's also quite possible that her nutritionist or people around her that she's been told to trust are the ones who started slipping something else into her daily vitamins or whatever else. You and I can't and don't know what each person's level of knowledge is if they don't all get equal training/resources.

I agree it's possible, but innocent or not, she has to bear the consequences of what entered her body. So definitely not a poor me situation whether or not she knew.

I initially shared your view that raising the senior eligibility age by 2 years wouldn't make a difference (because girls would still be trainng quads at 11) but at least it would have avoided the loophole of a minor having contravened certain rules for important competitions but being too young to be penalized. Perhaps the goal of discouraging yougnsters from over-training difficult elements and hurting themselves should be a combination of raising the minimum age AND banning ultra-Cs from non-senior competitions. This way they get to focus on the non-jump elements and on PCS too.

 

[PRlady]

Just a note that last I looked, college was an academic institution and set of activities. Sports talent should have nothing to do with university entrance, anymore than a student’s looks are. Wanna make money or fame out of sports? Go right ahead to the elite leagues or clubs if you can. Wanna make money off your looks? Be a model or influencer. Using athletic ability as part of the equation for getting into college is unfair, especially since the poor kids most at risk in sports like football and basketball often as not don’t get degrees and are steered to easy jock courses.

 

[Alilou]

“All young athletes must be protected against doping. Such protection cannot happen by exempting young athletes from sanctions.” ISU appealed to CAS in case of Kamila Valieva

ISU commented on the decision of The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to appeal to CAS against RUSADA decision in the case of figure skater Kamila Valieva.

fs-gossips.com

 

[Lemonade20]

This may be an unpopular opinion, but raising the age limit won't change anything. If you're old enough to skate in the Olympics, you're also old enough to know better what you're putting in your body. It's been over a year, and the medals need to be awarded already.

 

[Vagabond]

This may be an unpopular opinion, but raising the age limit won't change anything. If you're old enough to skate in the Olympics, you're also old enough to know better what you're putting in your body. It's been over a year, and the medals need to be awarded already.

A twelve-year-old girl won a gold medal in skateboarding at the Olympics in Tokyo in 2021. Do you really believe that she had the same wisdom as an adult?

 

[coppertop1]

Changing the age may not solve all the problems but it's a start. At the very least, it will close the protected person loopholes and avoid another fiasco

 

[Coco]

It's pretty well documented that universities use their sports teams as marketing tools. And sporting success, especially in men's basketball and football, directly translates to increased applications. Our American system of higher education is, like our healthcare, weird and problematic. But it's what we got and so many practices and mini-industries have been developed around it.

Setting up a system that requires people to deny or repress their natural competitive instincts is setting up that system to fail.

It's better to attack the problem by getting at the root of it. Make sure that the power to determine a teenager's future is not concentrated in a few hands or hidden behind a secretive process.

 

[MacMadame]

Setting up a system that requires people to deny or repress their natural competitive instincts is setting up that system to fail.

Natural competitive instincts don't require being an athlete at an elite level. There are plenty of ways to be competitive without putting 12-year-olds in the Olympic spotlight.

 

[gkelly]

There are plenty of problems in figure skating (actual and/or perceived) that changing age limits will have little effect on.

Which is why I always wondered why people jumped to that solution when the problem they were trying to solve (if I understood that correctly) might better be addressed through other means.

The one thing that changing the age limit does address is the problem of having athletes competing on the highest stage without being old enough to take responsibility for their actions.

If an athlete is young enough to be a "protected person" who is not held responsible for infractions, then they shouldn't be competing at that level.

For other problems, the new age limits may or may not offer improvement. Time will tell.

 

[Winnipeg]

If you are eligible to compete, and choose to compete, you are subject to the same rules as all of the other competitors regardless of age.

This whole thing is taking way too long because it seems everyone in decision-making roles is doing everything they can to rationalize her innocence even when confronted with guilty facts. If you start interpreting rules differently from one case to another...............it becomes a very slippery slope IMO.

 

[tony]

If you are eligible to compete, and choose to compete, you are subject to the same rules as all of the other competitors regardless of age.

Which no one is arguing or has argued. But I also think it's a stretch for some people to expect 15 or 16 or 17 year olds, if they are not getting an official training or class on banned substances, to do anything except for listen to the teams around them in terms of what they are able to take or not take. Even if they are getting an education about it, they still likely would revert to parents or coaching teams as understanding the rules better than they can.

I don't know about the rest of FSU, but I wasn't exactly a genius about pharmacology when I was a teenager.

 

[Coco]

Natural competitive instincts don't require being an athlete at an elite level. There are plenty of ways to be competitive without putting 12-year-olds in the Olympic spotlight.

The part in bold is true for some but not all. Regardless, it doesn't address my point that requiring people to not compete in a way they want to compete never works long term.

 

[Winnipeg]

Her 'team' should be responsible. If you do not have the knowledge yourself, due diligence requires you to ensure you have a knowledgeable person advising you. The rules are the rules or you lose credibility in the sport.

 

[tony]

Her 'team' should be responsible. If you do not have the knowledge yourself, due diligence requires you to ensure you have a knowledgeable person advising you. The rules are the rules or you lose credibility in the sport.

And who here has argued that those around her shouldn't be held responsible?

But who exactly should be responsible? Yes, it's easy to assume it was all Tutberidze's/the Doctor's doing, but a fact that keeps being left out of this whole thing is that skaters can be tested randomly at at any time during the year, not just during competitions. So if one were to believe Tutberidze had an entire schedule down and accidentally mis-dosed or overdosed Kamila too close to Nationals, that still doesn't explain why other skaters in her camp/on the Russian team have (except for a few cases) never tested positive any other time. [BTW- I don't know how often, if at all, they actually were tested but it still remains a possibility]

No one knows what Kamila's 24/7 schedule was, and it could very well be that her parents (or grandpa..) thought they had the secret to her success. Or it could be Tutberidze and she's managed to somehow get several of her previous students to trash her without saying a word about doping. I know she herself has talked about it in the past. But if one were to think this was a state-sponsored, across the board advantage, I'd ask you to sit through any mens free skate in recent history and explain why most of them crawl through their sloppy programs after 2 minutes

 

[kwanfan1818]

But who exactly should be responsible? Yes, it's easy to assume it was all Tutberidze's/the Doctor's doing, but a fact that keeps being left out of this whole thing is that skaters can be tested randomly at at any time during the year, not just during competitions. So if one were to believe Tutberidze had an entire schedule down and accidentally mis-dosed or overdosed Kamila too close to Nationals, that still doesn't explain why other skaters in her camp/on the Russian team have (except for a few cases) never tested positive any other time. [BTW- I don't know how often, if at all, they actually were tested but it still remains a possibility]

But isn't that true for all athletes subject to WADA regulations? Most of them manage to pass test after test, until some of them don't.

 

[VGThuy]

It takes a whole institutionalized scheme to have a robust doping program, whether it be a privately-owned entity, a personal network, or the entire state. Either way, if the goal is to promote fair play and to try to discourage intentional, institutionalized doping, then it's only fair to take away the results and medals for an underaged athlete even if she did not have knowledge of such actions because allowing that athlete to keep the results is still rewarding the system. It's a tough lesson for a minor who "did nothing wrong" but this is really beyond them at this point, and they shouldn't be rewarded since, like it or not, they are beneficiaries from the program. It's another lesson that cheating can have casualties.

 

[MacMadame]

The part in bold is true for some but not all. Regardless, it doesn't address my point that requiring people to not compete in a way they want to compete never works long term.

Doesn't work for whom? I can see it not working for the individual. But it should work for the sport

 

[carriecmu0503]

Which no one is arguing or has argued. But I also think it's a stretch for some people to expect 15 or 16 or 17 year olds, if they are not getting an official training or class on banned substances, to do anything except for listen to the teams around them in terms of what they are able to take or not take. Even if they are getting an education about it, they still likely would revert to parents or coaching teams as understanding the rules better than they can.

I don't know about the rest of FSU, but I wasn't exactly a genius about pharmacology when I was a teenager.

This is part of why I wish they would have upped the age limit to 18 instead of 17. 18 is the age of adulthood in the vast majority of places around the world. They could have just upped it to 18, made it that you must be an adult (as defined by most of the world) to compete on the senior circuit, and have been done with this. They would have never needed to revisit this again. As I see it, it is only a matter of time before something happens with a 17-year-old athlete in a major event, and the status as a minor is brought up as an excuse. Then, we get the whole horse and pony show all over again regarding whether to once again raise the age limit.

 

[Bigbird]

Do we honestly believe that Valieva doesn't know what was going on? Go back and look at her trajectory between 13 and 15 and all that has transpired after. They know she is guilty by the letter of the law but they have no evidence to convict the complicit adults, hence the handwringing. They know exactly what is what.

 

[Vagabond]

Do we honestly believe that Valieva doesn't know what was going on? Go back and look at her trajectory between 13 and 15 and all that has transpired after. They know she is guilty by the letter of the law but they have no evidence to convict the complicit adults, hence the handwringing. They know exactly what is what.

She doesn't dispute that she was doped, but she did try to pin the blame on rather than her coach.

I strongly suspect that even if she didn't understand how implausible her story was a year ago, she does now. Not that she's going to say so.