The Court of Arbitration for Sport intends to consider the appeal of the Canadian Figure Skating Federation regarding the challenge of bronze medals in the team tournament of the 2022 Olympic Games with the Russian team on July 22. Sports unravel the web of regulation that Canadians are eager to take advantage of.
During the second day of the ISU Congress, the organization's legal adviser, Michael Gistling, spoke about the union's most high-profile legal cases in recent times. We are, of course, talking about the team medals at the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing – on the one hand, they are disputed by Russia (we were deprived of gold and given bronze, but we want ours back), on the other, Canada, which became fourth. Which, well, really wanted to move to third place after the disqualification of Kamila Valieva, but somehow it hasn’t worked out yet.
According to Gistling, the Russian appeal will be considered by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) “tonight Las Vegas time.” This means, of course, June 12 – it’s just that for delegates now in the United States, North American time is much more important. But the Canadian one is much later:
““The exact date of the hearing has not yet been set, but yesterday CAS proposed that a hearing on this appeal be held on July 22,” Gistling said. “We respect this proposal, but we still hope that everything will pass before the start of the Summer Olympic Games in Paris.”
It is almost certain that the ISU wanted an earlier date precisely because of the Canadian appeal. After all, it was previously reported that the IOC and ISU are planning to hold a ceremony for awarding team medals (remember, none of the participating countries have ever seen them) on August 7 – during the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. And taking into account the fact that after hearings CAS takes an average of 2 weeks to make decisions, chances are high that the issue of bronze will remain suspended by the time of the ceremony.
But why is bronze relevant? Yes, because regarding gold, according to Gistling, “everything is logical” – at least for the ISU. The organization’s council had enough explanations from all parties to deprive us of first place and give us third – a Solomon-like decision, I must say, considering that according to the laws of the very logic that ISU lawyers refer to, we should have fallen back to fourth position. After all, if you disqualify Valieva, you at the same time take away from Russia all the points she scored. And the remaining ones will not be enough for bronze.
It is precisely this logic that, apparently, Canada will rely on in CAS. And we, apparently, are denied our own logic a priori – they say, they have already given you more than you deserve, where are you even going? This is probably why, long before the dates of the hearings and before the ISU Congress, it was announced that gold (USA) and silver (Japan) medalists of the Beijing team would be awarded in Paris, and silence for bronze.
Because bronze, apparently, still belongs to the wrong people. In this regard, it is very difficult to predict the outcome of the CAS hearings on the Canadian appeal, because, on the one hand, we are sometimes faced with a biased attitude towards our athletes against the backdrop of objective and not so objective factors. On the other hand, the regulations of the Olympic team figure skating tournament itself provide such scope for creativity that you’ll simply be overwhelmed. There are no tiebreaker rules or resolution of controversial situations in terms of anti-doping. There is, in essence, nothing at all except the basic provisions for selection for it and how many points a team receives for a particular performance.
Therefore, with a strong desire, CAS can easily satisfy the Canadian appeal, citing the sieve in the ISU regulations , as well as on that same logic. And what’s most offensive is that from a legal point of view they will even be right in some ways. At the same time, the ISU in this situation will come out of the water amazingly dry – “we tried to help you with at least something, but you know, this CAS…”
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