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The star of Russia’s ladies’s figure-skating workforce has examined constructive for a performance-enhancing drug on the Beijing Winter Olympics, officers stated on Friday, upending one of many main competitions on the Video games and implicating Moscow in one other high-profile dishonest scandal.
Kamila Valieva, 15, who this week grew to become the primary girl to land a quadruple leap in Olympic competitors, examined constructive for trimetazidine in a pattern collected on December 25, in accordance with the Worldwide Testing Company, anti-doping watchdog. Trimetazidine is a drug that improves blood circulate and is used to deal with coronary heart circumstances.
The take a look at was processed by the Russian Anti-Doping Company (Rusada) on Tuesday, a day after Valieva led her compatriots to victory within the workforce determine skating occasion, forward of the US and Japan. However the medal ceremony was suspended following experiences {that a} Russian athlete had failed a medication take a look at.
Valieva has appealed towards the discovering and took part in coaching on Friday after Rusada allowed her to follow and compete. The ITA, on behalf of the Worldwide Olympic Committee, stated it could attraction towards the Russian choice to the Courtroom of Arbitration for Sport, which handles worldwide authorized issues for athletic occasions.
The constructive take a look at outcome and Valieva’s deferred suspension constituted essentially the most important sporting scandal on the Beijing Video games.
The IOC imposed sanctions towards Russia over its state-run doping programme on the 2014 Sochi Winter Video games, banning the nation in 2017 from worldwide sports activities competitions.
However athletes declared to be “clear” have been allowed to compete beneath the Russian Olympic Committee moniker, swapping nationwide symbols such because the Russian flag and anthem for Olympic insignia and a passage from a Tchaikovsky concerto.
Valieva’s failed take a look at has renewed questions in regards to the efficacy of the sanctions programme. Mark Adams, IOC spokesperson, stated the organisation took “powerful however applicable motion” towards Russia when requested if the measures had been adequate.
Adams added that the IOC was working to discover a decision to all appeals within the case “for all these involved, not solely the Russian athlete”.
The Russian Olympic Committee and sports activities officers for the US and Japan didn’t reply to a request for remark.
The Winter Olympics have been the point of interest of wider geopolitical tensions. The US has led a diplomatic boycott of the Video games over Beijing’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang, the place it has interned greater than 1mn Muslim Uyghurs.
China’s president Xi Jinping has additionally used the event to sign his strengthening ties with Vladimir Putin, his Russian counterpart, as Moscow is engaged in a diplomatic stand-off with the west over Ukraine. The leaders held a summit forward of the opening ceremony final week, at which China joined Russia’s opposition to Nato enlargement.
Valieva had been anticipated to win the gold medal within the ladies’s particular person occasion, which begins on Tuesday. Victory would make the athlete, who’s competing in her first season as an elite determine skater, the third consecutive Russian teenager to be Olympic champion.
She is a part of a famend however controversial group coached by Eteri Tutberidze, who has educated lots of the sport’s champions over the previous decade, together with the 2018 gold and silver medallists in ladies’s determine skating.
Trimetazidine is included within the World Anti-Doping Company’s prohibited substances record as a “hormone and metabolic modulator” alongside meldonium, an analogous drug that was utilized by Russian tennis star Maria Sharapova, who was banned from competitors for 2 years in 2016.
Extra reporting by Thomas Hale in Beijing and William Langley in Hong Kong
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