Figure Skating Thread (Olympic Spoilers/Discussion starting at post #16)

[Doug1233]

I’m not saying she should have spoken up.

She IS a child.

But she is a drug cheat. And, given the circumstances, has much more culpability than Raducan.

And she should be banned from competing and her coaches should be banned too.

All can be true.

I’m not “getting off” on anything. This isn’t enjoyable for anyone involved.

 

[irichluck21]

I see here as a child who is being used as a pawn by coaching staff that had no disregard for her health and safety by putting her up to this. Now, she is being asked to lie to protect those coaches.
She is 15, not 3 so unsure how this whole “I took grandpa’s pill by accident” pans out.

That said, she is still a drug cheat, just one who is minor and was likely coerced by her coaches to take the medication.

Raducan took medication used to treat common colds, it was not a performance enhancer. Not to mention her teammates took it as well but it wasn’t shown in the sample due to her being smaller than the other two. Raducan admit she took it but it was for a cold and given by the team doctor.

Valieva took medication for heart concerns, which are banned doe to being able to enhance performance. Valieva appears to have admitted she took it but it was because she took grandpa’s medication on accident.

 

[Doug1233]

Valieva took medication for heart concerns

“Heart concerns”.

 

[RedBirdie]

She’s a 15 year old girl, in a coaching set up that is known to be abusive and coercive. But sure, if you get off on calling her a drugs cheat, knock yourself out.

I don’t find myself agreeing with MC all that often, but absolutely this. Should Valieva being competing? No. Is she 100% a pawn here, a cog in the system, lacking in agency, and almost certainly being forced to tell this bullshit grandfather story because the powers that be are desperately trying to laying all the blame on a child? Absolutely.

Tara might have been taught to question everything you ingest at 11, but does anyone actually think Eteri’s skaters are taught that? Of course not, those children are told never to question anything.

This is an indictment of Eteri, Russian FS, the ROC, ISU, and the IOC. They are all culpable in not only the known and ongoing physical and mental abuse of skaters, but also what appears to by systemic doping. Valieva shouldn’t compete because she was caught doping, but the truly guilty parties here are the adults who did this. Eteri and her team should be banned for life, from all sports. Russia should truly be banned from international competitions for, at minimum, another full Olympic cycle. ISU leadership should resign. The IOC should just be disbanded at this point. And the CAS should be taken out back and beaten.

 

[JDB]

Here’s another program we won’t see at the Olympics. I fell bad for her. She would have competed at the Olympics had RUSADA not been its usual self.

 

[Doug1233]

I don’t disagree with any of that. But none of that conflicts with anything I said, either.

What I challenge is the notion that because she’s 15 we can just ignore what happened and the gold, if she ends up being ranked #1, should belong to her.

 

[Doug1233]

In other news, I still can’t understand some of the GOE decisions. I know the BEL athlete does have more amplitude etc than Alyssa Liu, but the same judge gave the BEL athlete a -1 for her axel, with a hand down, and yet only gave Liu a +1 for hers, which looked really clean, nice transitions in and out. Yes it didn’t get up off the ice, but really there was only like 1.6 in total between a 2A with a hand down and one really decent one without.

The consequences of a fall/major error don’t really seem to be that much. Especially when the difference can be more than overcome by a few extra points on PCS.

 

[ucrgirl]

You are right that it is a very sad situation, and it is highly likely that the coaching situation is abusive. (There are way too many broken bones, too many athletes with eating disorders, too many athletes unable to compete in their late teens…) I think we are all talking about the positive drug test because there is proof of wrong doing. The other stuff that many people suspect doesn’t have as much hard evidence.

 

[makam]

Yeah, 2014 is when i decided the scoring was pretty bullshit. It seems like if you do hard tricks you get high pcs. Medium tricks get medium pcs. Falling 3 times, if you are one of the big name skaters, has no appreciable effect on your pcs. Basically just double the technical score and you’ll be within a point or three of what the PCS will be.

At least 90% of the time, the judges here can get to the same scores the gymnasts actually receive. Or can identify the ones the judges give a leo bonus to consistently. FS seems like a show up with big tricks, grab your face dramatically, and the big scores will flow in.

 

[Dex]

I did not say that! Just said to leave it until after the games and for now enjoy the performances of all the skaters. There is an ongoing investigation, maybe good to wait until that is completed instead of drawing conclusions.

 

[ArnoldRimmer]

She knew she was taking a substance. Three. At least.

Maybe her, or her mom, should have asked “what am I taking here?”

Tara said she was schooled on this from 11 years of age.

This just seems extremely unrealistic to me.

The idea that she’d actually be in a position to ask has been covered, so I won’t dwell on that, but let’s say she did. Practically speaking, what do you think would happen if Kamila did ask, in this abusive set up located within a fairly repressive society that practices state sanctioned doping? Do you think she would’ve been told the whole truth, that she was being given a banned substance in order to cheat, rather than them claiming it was a vitamin or similar? Why would the people around her, in this abusive structure, have done that? Nothing in it for them. She’s not in a situation where meaningful consent can be assumed.

But let’s say they did tell Kamila the truth when she asked, rather than lying or responding abusively, then the next steps. She’d then need to have acquired from somewhere an understanding that this was wrong, that other countries weren’t also doing it or something equal to it as well. That she would be putting herself at an unfair advantage rather than levelling the playing field. She’s going to have picked this up in a Russian elite sports facility that loves doping, is she? Pull the other one. And really, what Tara Lipinski says about her experiences in a totally different society nearly 30 years ago is completely irrelevant.

Still though, let’s say she somehow did acquire an understanding of this. She fully understands the horror of what’s happening. That just leaves her being a 15 year old in a probably abusive coaching scenario, quite possibly with the connivance of her parents, with powerful people around her who really want her to keep taking those substances and have a lot riding on it. What exactly do you expect her to be capable of doing?

I think the problem here is that you’re letting your very understandable anger at this complete shitshow influence your views about the child at the centre of this. But it’s perfectly possible to accept and understand the position she was in whilst also holding the view that she shouldn’t be competing.

 

[onodian]

I would argue it’s even worse, I’d say it’s personal favoritism. If it was high difficulty = high pcs at least you could argue a general human bias, kind of like our ramblings on harder elements being judged differently than easier ones. But I followed it for a bit longer than 2014 just because Fernandez was there, and I remember they would really keep the Chinese skater (Boyang Jin) behind fernandez and hanyu purely by virtue of the pcs, because at the time he was successfully completing more and harder quads than them both. So it’s kind of a popularity contest I feel.

 

[onodian]

I’m giving this response perfect PCS marks.

 

[arabiandoublefront]

I gave up on understanding GOE and PCS a long time ago.

 

[makam]

I remember that every year a new “jumping bean” would arrive on the scene and wow everyone with the ease of her triple triple or whatever. But the judges would use the pcs to keep him/her lower than the older skaters who didn’t have the same technical content but who were said to have better artistry, skating skills, performance quality, etc. By the time the jumper had gained enough reputation to get the higher pcs numbers, they had usually gone through puberty and had lost most of their technical advantage. Now a new jumping bean appears and has all the performance and interpretation numbers as the 23 year old skater who can barely eke out a 3-3 because hips and boobs are not an advantage.

I didn’t like artificially keeping younger skaters down until it was “their turn”, but it did encourage longevity in the sport and not the current “new upgraded model replaces you each year” that is currently happening. The problem is that if pcs is tracable to a standard, that standard is not clear, there seems to be no ability to mark a skater lower than whatever level they have previously reached, no matter how bad their skate on the day, and no indication that scores “out of range” are even looked at.

 

[JDB]

US, Canada, and Russia figured out how to “use” the IJS and make sure the dysfunctional aspects of judging stay in place. There’s no point in improving skating skills because national affiliation and starting order have more influence over the skating skills score. These countries are willing to depress figure skating’s international development to get their own marginal scoring benefits.

 

[ArnoldRimmer]

That was just awful.

I’m watching on the BBC and Robin Cousins is barely keeping it together himself. He said it’s hard to understand why the adults around Valieva thought this was a better response to the positive test than just letting her go home. He’s so right. I’m glad for the athletes who’ll now get a medal ceremony, especially the Japanese one who in my entirely uniformed opinion was the best to watch of the top 5… but this should never have happened. That poor child. The adults around her are filth.

 

[Seyonne]

Holy cow! Valieva ended up in fourth!

 

[Doug1233]

That awful coach is now going to gleefully bathe in all this sympathy for Valieva.

 

[onodian]

Imagine how many mistakes she had to make to drop 3 places in figure skating. She probably still got 8.5+ performance marks. Still, an improvement from that time hanyu fell 5 times in the fs and ended up dropping ONE position to silver (which gpf was this, can’t recall)