Kamila Valieva — A Fifteen-Year-Old, a Banned Heart Drug, and an Adult System That Failed Her

Kamila Valieva was fifteen years old when she skated at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, and fifteen when a sample she had given six weeks earlier was revealed, mid-Games, to contain a banned heart medication. On January 29, 2024, the Court of Arbitration for Sport found that she had committed an anti-doping rule violation, imposed a four-year ban backdated to December 25, 2021, and disqualified all of her results from that date — including the Olympic team event in which she had skated for the Russian Olympic Committee. As a consequence, the ROC’s team gold was lost: the International Skating Union re-ranked the event, elevating the United States to gold and Japan to silver.

The substance was trimetazidine, an anti-anginal drug that improves cardiac efficiency and is banned in sport. The sample was collected on December 25, 2021, at the Russian national championships by RUSADA. The result should have been processed in days. Instead the WADA-accredited Stockholm laboratory did not report the positive until February 8, 2022 — after Valieva had already helped the ROC win the team event in Beijing. The timing detonated the Games’ most painful controversy, and it was a failure of the adult laboratory and reporting system, not of the child who had given the sample.

Because she was fifteen, Valieva was a “protected person” under the World Anti-Doping Code — a category created to shield minors, who cannot reasonably be held to an adult’s standard of personal responsibility, and to direct scrutiny toward the coaches, doctors, and officials around them. A CAS ad hoc panel cited that status during the Games in allowing her to keep competing; the final ruling two years later still imposed the standard four-year sanction, holding that her protected status did not eliminate the consequence. But the question her case forced was never really about a teenager’s culpability. It was about the system of adults that put a banned drug into the body of a child and then took six weeks to say so — and this dossier aims its scrutiny where it belongs, at the entourage and the institutions. The skater at the centre was a minor, the person the Code exists to protect.

Sun Yang — A Smashed Blood Vial, a Banned Arbitrator, and a Lost Olympics

Sun Yang, the most decorated swimmer China has produced and a three-time Olympic champion, was banned in 2021 for four years and three months — not for a drug found in his body, but for what happened to a vial of his blood. On the night of 4 September 2018, anti-doping officials arrived at his home to collect samples. By the time they left, a container holding his blood had been smashed with a hammer, and the case the testers had come to fill went unfilled. The verdict on record is a refusal-and-tampering sanction handed down by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, not a positive test, and the distinction is the whole story.

The mechanism was almost defiantly simple. Sun and his entourage disputed the credentials of the doping-control personnel; an argument escalated; and rather than let the sample leave with testers he deemed unauthorized, a member of his camp used a hammer to break open the container so the blood could not be carried away. Under the World Anti-Doping Code, destroying or tampering with a sample is itself an anti-doping rule violation, treated as seriously as a positive result. An athlete does not get to adjudicate the legitimacy of his own drug test in real time and then dismantle the evidence when he loses the argument.

The case then took a detour that few doping disputes ever take. CAS first banned Sun for eight years in February 2020 — the maximum available. He appealed to the Swiss Federal Tribunal, which in December 2020 set that ruling aside, not on the facts but because the chairman of the arbitration panel had posted offensive social-media comments that gave objectively justified doubts about his impartiality. The case went back for a fresh hearing before a new panel, which in June 2021 reached the same conclusion on the merits and reduced the ban to four years and three months, treating it as Sun’s second violation.

What it cost him was the prime of a career. The ban, calculated to run from the date of the original award, kept Sun out of the Tokyo Olympics, where he would have defended his 200-metre freestyle title. He did not return to eligibility until May 2024, by then in his thirties. He lost no medals to disqualification, because the offence was not a doping positive that invalidated a result. He lost something harder to award to a runner-up: the years.