The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has rejected the Russian side's appeal to strip the team gold medal from the 2022 Olympic Games in figure skating due to the Kamila Valieva case. Sports tells whether Russia will at least retain its bronze medals.
Why aren't figure skaters invited to Paris? The decision was expected, but no less sad. Our side had a catch in the form of the strange positioning of the team tournament — formally, it is an individual sport, but in this case we are talking about a team, where the rules for redistributing results in the event of disqualification for doping are much more lenient. But it seems that CAS did not take them into account. Neither the testimony of our entire Olympic team nor the legal team helped.
In terms of changing the results, the court is guided by the regulations of the regulatory body, which in this case is the International Skating Union (ISU). Accordingly, the question of the theoretical return of the gold medal to us lay in the plane of alleged violations in internal documents, serious violations at that. Apparently, they did not find any — and left the decision unchanged.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has already welcomed the CAS decision. «This decision comes just in time to ensure that gold and silver medals can still be awarded at the 2024 Olympic Games. The IOC will now work to bring the athletes to Paris and hold the ceremony here at the Parc des Champions,» the IOC said in its response to the request.
But both the IOC and the ISU are ignoring the most important question: what to do with the bronze medals? Formally, they are now stuck halfway to Russia, since the ISU awarded them to us following the investigation into Valieva's case. But the Canadians, who took fourth place in the team event, challenged this decision, also in the CAS. The court created two separate panels to hear our and the Canadian appeals, and while they have already finished with our judge, they are still sorting out the Canadian one. The hearing on it took place on July 24, but today the CAS issued a statement indicating that at the moment it cannot know when the decision will be made on the second case.
But the problem with the latter is the most acute. Because if the awards are to be given during the 2024 Olympics in Paris, then our guys need to be invited to the ceremony now, otherwise there is a high risk of not having time to get visas. And plane tickets are also problematic now.
Plus, the IOC clearly needs to prepare the ground for something like this. Almost certainly, the decision to award us bronze will encounter a wave of discontent, which it would be desirable to extinguish immediately, in the bud. Instead, now the entire world sport seems to have frozen in mid-position — the command “front” has not yet sounded, but everything is ready.
Do the Russians need bronze? In this regard, of course, the most advantageous decision for «them» would be to award bronze to the Canadians. Then they can be urgently called to the ceremony and calmly handed all the medals. But does CAS have grounds for such a decision? The ISU's argumentation in the matter of awarding bronze to the Russian team is, on the one hand, logical — as the union's legal consultant Michael Gistlinger said, depriving Russia of any medals based on Kamila's ban would mean that «it would be as if the Russian team was not at the Games at all.» Which, of course, is not true.
On the other hand, doesn't the deprivation of gold fall under the same thesis? Well, it seems that it was won by clean athletes, none of whom were caught using a prohibited substance at the Games. Besides, if we had put Anna Shcherbakova or Alexandra Trusova in place of Kamila, would we really not have had gold? Even if we assume that neither Anna nor Alexandra would have taken first place.
Perhaps Gistlinger meant that anyone could have come out from our team in women's singles, and even if this mystical «someone» had taken the last two places in the short and free programs, we would have had bronze. In general, this logic can be considered working — after all, in this case, the Canadians would have added only a couple of points to their result (55 against 53, which is what they have now), while we would have been guaranteed to get at least seven, of which six is the minimum possible result for the free program. The total would have been 55 against 61 — and we are in third place.
Or you can twist Gistlinger's words further and extract another meaning. It would be wrong for the ISU to pretend that the Russian skater did not compete in the ladies' event at all — if only because, in addition to Kamila, we had two more girls in reserve, which means that 0 points in both events would have been, well, extremely unlikely. So the ISU instead pretended that the maximum score of 10 points, which Valieva scored in both events, did not exist — and instead began to count the maximum of 9 points, which is usually given for second place. The ISU protected itself from the hypothetical «what if we could have made a substitution?» and as if asked a counter question — «and who knows how you would have skated in this case? What if you took the last two places? So here's your bronze, and more — well, excuse me.»
There is a possibility that CAS, having entered the territory of ISU meanings, will agree with their arguments — and then Canada can forget about the award ceremony. There is a high probability that this will happen. But will our skaters be happy with this bronze? The question is rhetorical, and it is unlikely that we will receive a balanced and rational answer to it in the near future.
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