Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva handed four-year ban for doping

The Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva, whose positive doping test as a 15-year-old dominated headlines at the 2022 Winter Olympics, has been banned for four years by the court of arbitration for sport.

The ruling also means all Valieva’s results achieved after her failed test on 25 December 2021 have now been stripped from the record books.

However Cas has not immediately stripped the Russians, led by Valieva, of their gold medal in the team event. In a statement explaining its ruling, Cas said that power was “not within the scope of this arbitration procedure and will have to be examined by the sports organisations concerned”.

However there seems little doubt that the International Skating Union will now strip the Russian team of their medal and move the US team up to gold.

Valieva became the first woman to complete a quadruple jump at the Olympic team event, as the Russian Olympic Committee won gold. But a day later it emerged that she had tested positive for trimetazidine (TMZ), designed to prevent angina, at the Russian national championships in December 2021, weeks before the Games.

The delay in testing her sample on Christmas Day had been caused by a Covid outbreak among workers at a doping laboratory in Sweden. But when the news was announced it led to a media storm which dominated the Winter Olympics.

While in Beijing, Valieva’s legal team claimed that her positive drugs test may have come from a contaminated glass of water that contained traces of her grandfather’s heart medication. Amid after days of legal rancour, she was eventually allowed to continue competing by Cas but, under the most severe pressure, she fell twice in the individual figure skating and finished fourth.

There then followed nearly two years of legal procedures before Cas finally reached its decision on Monday.

In a statement, Cas said: “Ms Valieva did not contest liability in that she accepted that, by reason of the presence of a TMZ in her sample, she had committed an anti-doping rule violation (ADRV). It was therefore a matter for the CAS Panel to consider what sanctions, if any, should be imposed on Ms Valieva.

“Having carefully considered all the evidence put before it, the CAS panel concluded that Ms Valieva was not able to establish, on the balance of probabilities and on the basis of the evidence before the Panel, that she had not committed the ADRV intentionally.

It added: “Accordingly, since it was determined that there was no scope for the exercise of discretion to reduce the period of ineligibility, a four-year period of ineligibility was imposed by the Panel.

“The Cas panel also ordered the disqualification of all competitive results achieved by Ms Valieva from 25 December 2021, with all the resulting consequences (including forfeiture of any titles, awards, medals, profits, prizes, and appearance money).

“The consequences linked to the retroactive disqualification of Ms Valieva from past events, including from the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022, were not within the scope of this arbitration procedure and will have to be examined by the sports organisations concerned.”