BEIJING — That was awful to watch, heartbreaking, infuriating. It will go down as one of the worst moments in modern Olympic history.
Kamila Valieva is just 15. No one deserves the grievous public shaming she got here in 2022 in Beijing. And for what?
Predictably, on the ice Thursday evening, Valieva broke. She fell. She cried. Expected to win, she dropped to fourth, out of the medals.
Who is to blame for this? This is now the question.
Her “entourage”?
But beyond — who else bears the blame for inflicting this sort of trauma on a 15-year-old?
Valieva at the end of her program // Getty Images
Moments later, in kiss and cry, with coach Eteri Tutberidze, left, and choreographer Daniil Gleikhengauz // Getty Images
The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, and their sanctimonious hypocrisy? Both may believe they scored political points with a domestic audience. In the weeks and months to come, both surely will learn around the world, and in particular within the Olympic landscape, how grievously they misplayed this.
In the meantime: the western media, and in particular the many outlets from the United States with their condemnation and worse? There was little logic but considerable emotion run amok in the many thousands of words written, the righteous judgment and venom hurled the way of a 15-year-old girl who was deserving of something else entirely, as a Court of Arbitration for Sport panel sought to make clear — due process and fairness.
Kamila Valieva is 15. She has not been convicted of — anything. Not one thing. In the United States of America, a nation that purportedly prizes the notion of innocent until proven otherwise, that led the world in establishing a system of justice that institutionalized the concept of due process under the law and celebrates the right of an individual when measured against a system, it’s not only reasonable but mandatory to ask, here and now, did this 15-year-old girl get anything near what she is entitled to from the American court of public opinion?
And why not?
For that matter, did any single one of the girls in the Russian camp?
And why not?
The adults are a separate matter entirely. To be clear: this matter offers the test case the World Anti-Doping Agency and perhaps others have been waiting for to exert leverage over an athlete’s “entourage.” It is entirely unrealistic to have expected a 15-year-old to have exerted agency over anything she was taking, or not. The adults around that 15-year-old, and the other Russian skaters? 100 percent responsible.
It’s critical here to note that almost everyone everywhere in the Olympics — or even the NFL — has an “entourage.” Being Russian doesn’t make an entourage evil. Being Russian just makes them Russian. Can we all get that through our minds?
The point of an Olympic Games, as International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach keeps saying, is to bring humanity together in all our diversity. To learn from and with each other. Two years into a pandemic that has killed so many, we need more empathy, not less. We need more of the Games’ aspirational ideals. Not heated rhetoric that demonizes people from other places.
That sort of behavior turns others, as history teaches, into The Other.
That is what the western press did this week with Kamila Valieva.
Like all mobs, the mob that was the media tried to say that it was not the problem — it tried to shift the blame onto CAS and the IOC, and the ROC for “allowing” her to skate. That would absolve them, of course, of responsibility. Again, what CAS said is elemental: Kamila Valieva deserved due process — that is, a full hearing in due time on the merits — and fairness. The rest is on the mob for rushing to judgment, and without the fullness of all the facts.
At an Olympics, at what should be an opportunity to celebrate the best of us, this week saw the rise of the mob. The worst of us. And like all mobs, there would be only one course. Destroy.
Do we ever learn?
Those were real human beings out there. Girls. Teens. The mob — aggrieved over the Sochi 2014 drama — circled, vilified, broke Kamila Valieva. She is just 15. The mob did not care. CAS, in its declaration, said nothing about Sochi. The IOC said there was no such evidence.
The response?
Ban the Russians!
Sasha Trusova, 17, who took second Thursday, was reported to have said this before appearing late Thursday on the podium: “I hate everyone. Never in my life — never, I hate this sport!”
The entire scene Thursday night was awful, it was heartbreaking and it was so infuriating. Kamila Valieva deserved better. Any 15-year-old does. We all do.