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.