Kamila Valieva saga raises question of Olympic age limits: 'anything older than 15'

BEIJING — Kamila Valieva arrived at these Olympics to stretch the boundaries of her sport. Instead, two weeks later, her tainted brilliance has renewed a push to impose an unstretchable boundary on young figure skaters — an age limit that, if in place for these 2022 Games, would have prevented Valieva from competing.

As Valieva, 15, skated halfway to another gold medal in Tuesday’s short program, several competitors supported proposals to raise the International Skating Union’s age minimum from 15 to 17 or 18.

“I mean, anything older than 15, I'll be happy with at this point,” Switzerland’s Alexia Paganini, 20, said.

Even Alysa Liu, 16, the top U.S. skater in Tuesday’s competition, said she “probably wouldn't mind” a new age limit that affected her.

As Liu spoke, Valieva skated in her second event of these Olympics thanks to a Court of Arbitration for Sport ruling that relied, in part, on Valieva’s status as a minor. CAS decided against provisionally suspending Valieva for this week’s women’s singles competition, and cited a “Protected Person” provision in the World Anti-Doping Code that allows for more lenient treatment of athletes under 16.

The ruling, to many current and former skaters, highlighted an inherent conflict in sporting rules. “I feel like if you can skate here, you can also get sent back [home],” Liu said. If you’re mature enough to compete with adult athletes, the thinking went, you’re mature enough to be punished as one.

But many skaters and non-skaters also expressed sympathy for Valieva. Her “entourage” — coaches, officials, support staff — will be investigated for their role in her positive test. Documents submitted to CAS, one of which was reviewed by Yahoo Sports, revealed that Valieva had three endurance-aiding substances in her system at the time of the Dec. 25 test. Only one, trimetazidine, is banned, but the combination raised suspicions that her doping was systemic, and perhaps imposed upon her by adults.

“Clearly,” U.S. anti-doping chief Travis Tygart told Yahoo Sports on Wednesday, “somebody has taught her or coached her, directed her, to use these substances.”

In the figure skating world, some have used Valieva’s example to argue that age limits would protect teen athletes from the immense pressure that incentivizes the use of performance-enhancing drugs, or the submission to unhealthy training environments.

Others have argued that it is, naturally, a young woman’s sport. Five of the top eight skaters after Tuesday’s short program are 17 or younger. One of them, Liu, explained afterward how quad jumps were “a lot easier when I was smaller and a lot shorter.” Puberty and growth, she said, had made them “harder.”

But she and others supported an age limit for a variety of reasons if it produced a level playing field. “Bodies would be more developed and there'd be less injury,” Great Britain’s Natasha McKay, 27, said. Several Olympians said it would incentivize longevity instead of teen stardom, and drive the sport in a healthier direction.

“You want these athletes to have an opportunity to have this be a profession,” U.S. skater Mariah Bell, 25, said. “Not like a one-year run at it.”

Valieva’s coach, Eteri Tutberidze, has come under scrutiny for churning through young skaters with an intense focus on single-Olympic runs, and without regard for their long-term well-being. Many skaters beyond Tutberidze’s reign have described how, when they were powerless minors, they felt that success required an unflinching adherence to powerful coaches’ methods.

“When I was 15, 16, I was a completely different person,” U.S. skater Karen Chen, now 22, said Tuesday. “I’m completely different body-wise, brain-wise. I was not afraid of anything. I didn’t have doubts. I don’t know if robot is the right word, but my coaches would tell me to go do something and I’d do it.”

At the time, it built her into a star. “But now,” she said, at 22 — young in almost any walk of life, but old in women’s figure skating — if she did the repetitive jumps she’d do as a teen, “my body would tell me, ‘you need to chill out for a second because everything hurts.’ I guess it’s part of development and part of maturing.”

And it isn’t a negative, many argue. It’s a positive development. Some skaters “peak young,” McKay acknowledged. But she didn’t have the “mental approach” at age 15 that she did at 19, when she began putting everything into skating. By then, she and others are more capable of making that decision to “put everything into” the sport for themselves.

A more restrictive age minimum might keep stars out of the Olympics. But it would reform training programs, and ease ramp-ups to peaks, and perhaps keep stars in the sport well beyond their teenage years.

If an age limit had made Liu ineligible for Beijing, “I'd just be like, ‘OK, I just have to wait a little bit longer,’” she said. “Which is fine. I've trained so long, might as well just do a little bit longer.”