The US figure skating team was formally confirmed as gold medalists from the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics by a sports court ruling on Thursday, opening the way for the team to receive medals at the Paris Summer Games.
“We are thrilled to finally honor these incredible athletes,” Sarah Hirshland, chief executive of the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, said in a statement. “We are especially excited that the beautiful city of Paris will join us in this celebration.”
It is now more than two years since the American skaters left the Beijing Winter Games without a medal of any color. They had placed second in the team event to the Russians including teenage star Kamila Valieva, who within hours was implicated in a doping case that took almost two years to judge.
Now, Evan Bates, Karen Chen, Nathan Chen, Madison Chock, Zachary Donohue, Brandon Frazier, Madison Hubbell, Alexa Knierim and Vincent Zhou should be coming to Paris as official Olympic champions.
On Thursday, the court of arbitration for sport (CAS) said three judges dismissed Russian appeals to be reinstated as gold medalists. The Olympic title was lost in January when Valieva was disqualified and banned for four years.
It took the latest CAS ruling in the Valieva saga to guarantee the US athletes their overdue gold medals, and for Japan to be in line for upgraded silvers.
Special medal ceremonies are planned by the International Olympic Committee in the second week of the Paris Olympics to honor athletes whose results have been upgraded because of doping cases that were prosecuted and resolved in recent years. Those celebrations will be in the Champions Park plaza looking across to the Eiffel Tower on the opposite bank of the Seine River.
“This [CAS] decision comes just in time to still be able to make the medal allocation for gold and silver possible,” the IOC said in a statement.
“We are glad that this opportunity can be offered to the athletes and teams who, unfortunately, had to wait for a very long time for their medals due to the ongoing legal case,” the Olympic body said. Valieva, who was 15 years old in Beijing, starred as Russia easily won the team event. No medals were presented because a positive doping test for a banned heart medication, from a sample Valieva gave in Russia six weeks earlier, was revealed on the day the team event ended.
She was cleared by a Russian anti-doping tribunal that ruled she was not at fault for being contaminated by her grandfather’s prescription for Trimetazidine. The proof was lacking, and the World Anti-Doping Agency appealed to CAS.
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The explanation at the CAS that Valieva ingested the drug in a strawberry dessert her grandfather prepared was not believed by that judging panel. Without Valieva’s scores when she was disqualified, the Russians dropped to third in the revised result signed off by the International Skating Union.
The Canadian team is awaiting the verdict in a separate appeal to the CAS about the revised scores, asking to be upgraded from fourth to third, thereby knocking the Russians off the podium. The CAS said on Thursday it was “not possible to indicate at this time” when it will give the Canadian appeal verdict.
The world skating body said it “extends its gratitude to the athletes for their patience and resilience throughout this process”.
