Tutberidze on Valiyeva's doping sample delay: "The medal of the Olympics-2022 should not be reconsidered. Was the athlete there clean? Yes. Questions to WADA, to the laboratory - it's their fault"

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Eteri Tutberidze believes that the gold medalist of the Olympic Games 2022 should not be reconsidered.

In December 2021, Valieva passed a positive doping test. This became known already during the Olympics-2022 in Beijing, where the figure skater won the team event with the Russian national team. Because of the start of the investigation, the awarding never took place.

– I would like to talk about Kamila… And in general, can you at least have some idea of what it’s like and what it is….

– I was running through the options, the questions in my head.

I’d like to put everyone involved in this trial on a lie detector. I want to know the truth, where did it come from, what is it, why? So many questions, and I think I’ll probably never get an answer to them. I have to live with it.

– I have a simple question: How does a conditionally unclean athlete…?

– How do you get to the Olympics? When teams go – America, Canada, Japan, it doesn’t matter which team – the president of the figure skating federation of that country or another country… First of all, we don’t have access to their personal offices, which they fill out tests.

Well we know for a fact that if they’re cleared for the Olympics, they’re all clean. If they get there, they get an Olympian passport, they’re all clean. Next, they decide who participates in the team event – that’s kept secret, strategically. If we find out that if, let’s say, the U.S. team is not fielding the strongest, maybe we won’t go with Trump either.

But since no one knows, everyone tries to go in with the trumps right away. You don’t know if they’re going to put Nathan Chen or not. Well. What’s the difference? These athletes are all numbers. Period. How does an athlete with a hang-up get into the Olympics?

– Theoretically, she could have been tested after the ride and they could have said after the fact, yes, he came in clean, but here at the Olympics….

– Wait. After the World Cup – at Europe – she took a test, the analysis was clean. Then again – clean. At the Olympics, after the short, then they will take it again – everywhere – clean.

If they had that test, how did they let her in? So they should have done anything to double-check it, to have it ready. They shouldn’t have let such an athlete into the Olympic village already.

My opinion: there should be no team medal consideration at all. Whose fault was it that this athlete was on the team? Whose? Ours? No. Was the athlete clean at the Olympics? Yes.

How did she end up clean? I don’t even know who to ask: WADA, the lab.

Then let them print a new medal, do whatever they want. It’s their fault. It’s not the team’s fault at all. Because we had an athlete, he was clean at this start. He skated. The medal should not be revised.

They would have said about the results that she had unclean doping at the World Cup – 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th (February – Sports.ru), Anya (Shcherbakova) and Sasha (Trusova) would have skated. All of them, and the team’s result would have been exactly the same. They would have won, too,” said Eteri Tutberidze, honored figure skating coach of Russia, on the air of “Comment.Coach” with Leonid Slutsky.

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