Winter Olympic || Kamila Valiyeva: Pale as the ice
It shouldn't be here, in Beijing's Capital Indoor Arena, where - there's no other way to put it - the heart of this Winter Games beats: the consistently spectacular short track races. And with the emotional par force rides of the figure skaters. But 15-year-old child prodigy Kamila Valiewa is taking on the challenge – and will fall into the abyss.
Normally, the women's freestyle is a high mass of games that nobody wants to miss. And under normal circumstances, this is also one of the more pleasant must-attend dates for any IOC President. But Thomas Bach pulls back, just as he keeps a low profile all the days in which this opaque doping story is already brewing. There is nothing for anyone to gain in this matter.
 |
| The Big Blow With Haaland |
The IOC and probably Bach would have liked to see this young Kamila Valiyeva banned, but that was allegedly not possible according to the sometimes difficult to understand letters of sports law. After all, the IOC wanted to cancel the award ceremony prophylactically so that a potential doperine would not have to be given a precious metal. It is the second time at these games, because the medals in the team competition will not be awarded for the time being because Valiyeva ran with them. The second and third place winners from the USA and Japan don't like that because it takes them away from the highest Olympic moment, the award ceremony.
The women's short program also suffered badly from Valiyeva's side effects. The other 29 participants tried as best they could to distance themselves from the hype. That's big enough for an Olympic competition anyway. Some spoke about it, such as the American Alysa Liu, herself only 16 years old: "I don't know every detail of the case, but one thing is clear: if a doped athlete competes against clean athletes, it's not fair." Estonian Eva-Lotta Kiibus, 19, says: "It is what it is. Should someone who has tested positive be allowed to compete? No."
 |
| Winter Olympics: Race Of Only Children |
The experienced women in the field, such as the German Nicole Schott, 25, and the American Mariah Bell, who is the same age, advocate raising the age limit for participation. It's best to be 18 years old, says Schott, because you're also criminally responsible. Bell thinks it would be good for the whole sport if established personalities competed "whom you can cheer on for a few years and who make the sport more interesting," she thinks of her compatriot Michelle Kwan, who shaped an entire era. Because many of the child prodigies of recent years, not a few from the care of Kamila Valiyeva's trainer Eteri Tutberidze, burned up after the first spectacular appearances like shooting stars, disappeared from the scene or became anorexic.
But then, despite the history, the competition unstoppably unfolds its magic. "The wings of steel" is what the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, himself a passionate ice skater, called the runners in one of his odes; the ice skate was a miracle to him, "I would have seen fewer suns, without a soul from you! What days you gave me!" And today is such a day.
 |
| Messi's Bad Run Against Madrid |
To the uninitiated, all of the jumps that momentarily transform the runners into air creatures may resemble one another. But from the six basic shapes, well over 100 different ways of taking off, flying and landing can be derived. And that too is part of the unique atmosphere of such a competition: all the spectators, even the professional cynics in the press box, sincerely wish every runner the success of their excursions into higher realms. And all suffer when a storm from heaven fails; the audience is like one multi-limbed body, gasping between its teeth in shock.
In the end, everyone wishes Kamila Valiyeva only the best when she finally steps onto the ice. She could complete a purely Russian, a Tutberidze podium, because Valiyeva's fiercest competitors are also her protégés – or should one say victims?
Alexandra Trussova said before the competition that she actually hated her sport. Now she has shown an incredible five quadruple jumps, as many as the winner of the men's competition. Not all of them are flawless, but in the technical difficulty rating, she is uncatchable and runs the best freestyle. Anna Shcherbakova runs the cleanest of all medal contenders; in the end, eleven of the twelve traffic light boxes on the TV screens that indicate the success or failure of a program point are green.
 |
| Kamila Valieva Will Continue To Compete |
All the pressure is on Valiyeva. And with her freestyle, she also places herself in an almost overwhelming tradition: she runs to the music of Maurice Ravel's Boléro , with which the ice dancer couple Jayne Torvill/Christopher Dean revolutionized the entire sport in 1984. As if all of this were too heavy, their "wings of steel" didn't fly that evening. She falls, not just once, everything slips away from her - how not, after everything that fell on her. At the end she puts her hands in the red gloves in front of her face, she probably already suspects that it won't even be enough for a medal. Pale as ice, she waits in the " Kiss and cry " corner for the bad certainty: fourth place.
In the end it was too much for the heart patient. Because, if the package inserts for the games' most controversial competition are to be believed, the 15-year-old was on at least three medications when she competed at the Russian Figure Skating Championships on Christmas Dayhad to submit a doping sample: trimetazidine (an anti-constriction drug), hypoxene (against cardiac arrhythmias) and L-carnitine (against circulatory disorders and to strengthen heart muscle function after an infarction). At the latest when this mixture became public, it should have been taken to the children's hospital for a more detailed examination. Or in the care of a children's charity - if over-ambitious adults like her trainer Tutberidze instilled all that stuff in her just to improve her performance.
In his poem The Ice Rink , Goethe, who was recommended the best ice skates by his friend Klopstock, wrote, "Falling is the lot of mortals . " But does a 15-year-old girl have to find out this way? Kamila Valiyeva has not yet left the interior of the hall when the light blue carpet for the award ceremony is already being rolled out and the podium is being carried in as if nothing had happened. "I saw from the first jump what a burden Kamila had to carry," says Anna Shcherbakova, who seems to be the most surprised by her Olympic victory. Alexandra Trussova, who wins silver in the end, says she doesn't feel lucky and is considering quitting. She is only 17 years old.
Do You Know What We Have Posted on
Post a Comment