Exempted from sanction by the Russian anti-doping agency, the young Russian skater Kamila Valieva will be retried on appeal by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, more than a year after her positive doping test for a prohibited substance which had splashed the Olympic Games in Beijing in February 2022.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) announced on Tuesday that it had appealed to the Lausanne court, to demand a four-year suspension and the cancellation of all the results of the 16-year-old teenager “from the date of the sample. of the sample, on December 25, 2021”.
If no hearing date has yet been set, the case promises to be very followed, as it mixes suspicions of doping hovering over Russian sport, debates on the substance found in the young skater, and special protection due to very young athletes.
“Politically important”, this file is “also legally and scientifically”, summed up in mid-January with AFP David Pavot, director of the world chair of anti-doping research at the University of Sherbrooke.
Crying in Beijing
In its statement, WADA considers “erroneous” the analysis of the disciplinary tribunal of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (Rusada), which declared in January that the young prodigy had committed “no fault or negligence”, therefore limiting itself to cancel her results of December 25, 2021, i.e. her title of Russian champion won in Saint Petersburg, without further sanction.
The positive result of Kamila Valieva, whose analysis had been delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, was revealed during the Beijing Olympics in February 2022, sparking a huge scandal when the teenager had already won gold in the team event and came out as the big favorite in the individual event.
Authorized to continue her Games while waiting for the case to be decided on the merits, Valieva had dominated the short program in a heavy climate, before cracking under the pressure in the free program to finish at the foot of the podium, in tears.
The 2022 European champion has been declared positive for trimetazidine. Found in a tiny concentration in his body, this molecule is prescribed to relieve angina pectoris and banned by the AMA since 2014, because it promotes blood circulation.
Accidental contamination?
From the start of the case, her defense raised possible “contamination via the cutlery” shared by the Russian teenager and her grandfather, who drove her to training every day and is treated with trimetazidine after the pose. of an artificial heart.
In addition, the reality of the doping effect of trimetazidine has been in doubt for several years, and had been unsuccessfully challenged in 2021 before the sports courts by the French wrestler Zelimkhan Khadjiev.
“The many Parkinsonian-type side effects do not seem to be likely to favor use in athletes”, underlined in 2020 the pharmacologist and toxicologist Pascal Kintz in the journal Toxicologie Analytique et Clinique, evoking the risks of gait disorders, falls and hallucinations.
Finally, the case of the skater will constitute a new case of friction in the coming months between Rusada and the world anti-doping policeman at a crucial moment.
WADA, whose headquarters are in Montreal, must indeed conduct a thorough examination before the reinstatement of the Russian agency after two years of exclusion from all major international competition for a cascade of cheating and institutional doping.