They Have Been Cheated!

[RANT]

With the Olympics ending the figure skating athletes have been cheated!

CAS rejects Team USA skaters' request for silver medals before end of Olympics
Yahoo Sports
By Jay Busbee
February 19, 2022


BEIJING — The United States figure skaters wanted their medals, and they wanted them before the Olympics were over.

On Saturday, just one day before the Closing Ceremony that will wrap the Beijing Olympics, the nine members of the United States’ team skating demanded, through attorneys, that the International Olympic Committee award them, prior to the ceremony, the silver medals they earned earlier in the Olympics. The team took the matter to the Court of Arbitration for Sport's ad hoc committee.

But the CAS said early Sunday in Beijing that it dismissed the appeal by the nine skaters.

They are being cheated!

They spent most of their lives working toward standing on the podium, and their dreams has been dashed!

Team USA’s skaters contend that failing to award them their duly-earned medals, regardless of whether they are the “final” medals, violates both the Olympic Charter — which calls for a presentation of medals at the venue or at a Medals Plaza — and the Host City agreement.

“Our clients have trained a lifetime for this opportunity to have their achievements publicly recognized before the world,” attorney Paul J. Greene of Global Sports Advocates wrote. “They are the embodiment of the Fundamental Principles of Olympism by creating a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example, social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.”

Amen!

Russia Is the Only Winner in the Kamila Valieva Mess
What did the IOC think was going to happen?
Slate
By Justin Peters
February 14, 2022


The one thing that seems clear about the most recent twist in the most recent Russian Olympic doping scandal—or, at least, as clear as anything about this convoluted story can seem—is that Kamila Valieva is not, ultimately, the problem. On Monday, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that the 15-year-old Russian figure skater, who in December tested positive for the banned substance trimetazidine, could continue to compete in the 2022 Beijing Games. The ruling prompted a torrent of righteous outrage, expressed most pithily by the NBC figure skating commentator Johnny Weir: “I have to condemn this decision with every ounce of my soul.”

Weir’s anger is completely understandable. Valieva is a phenom who already led the Russians to gold in the team figure skating event and is favored to win the individual competition this week. By allowing her to compete even in light of the positive test, the CAS is arguably sanctioning a nonlevel playing field. But while Valieva sits at the eye of the storm that is currently roiling the 2022 Beijing Games, the storm itself belongs to a much more persistent weather system that has clouded international sports for years. And with that, I’m Justin Peters, your Metaphor Meteorologist. Back to you, Mike Tirico!

Anyway—banning Valieva from competing this week would only solve a very specific problem: that it’s unfair to the other skaters to allow Valieva to participate after her positive test. This issue is real, and it certainly matters to the rest of the competitors, but focusing on it misses a more salient point. The Valieva scandal is a symptom of a systemic problem that’s much bigger than one 15-year-old skater.

[…]

Anyway—banning Valieva from competing this week would only solve a very specific problem: that it’s unfair to the other skaters to allow Valieva to participate after her positive test. This issue is real, and it certainly matters to the rest of the competitors, but focusing on it misses a more salient point. The Valieva scandal is a symptom of a systemic problem that’s much bigger than one 15-year-old skater.

Then there was the conveniently delay in testing the urine sample.

Court cites lab delay in ruling allowing Valieva to skate
AP
By Graham Dunbar
February 18, 2022


The judges who let Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva continue to compete at the Beijing Olympics blamed anti-doping officials in a legal document published Friday for a “failure to function effectively.”

The Court of Arbitration for Sport explained its verdict in the case that has dominated Olympic headlines for more than a week in a 41-page document, citing the “untenable delay” at the testing laboratory in Sweden as a reason for letting the 15-year-old Valieva skate in the women’s competition.

Valieva’s positive test for a heart medication was only revealed during the Olympics despite her urine sample arriving at the Stockholm lab on Dec. 29. The lab’s staffing was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

[…]

WADA [World Anti-Doping Agency] again said Russian anti-doping officials should share blame for the delayed test result from Stockholm because they “did not flag the high-priority nature of the sample despite being informed by the laboratory of delays being caused by a COVID-19 outbreak among its staff.”

Wasn’t that so very convenient?

The one sample that contained the doped urine sample they forgot to tag and was tested until it was too late!

This is the second time the IOC appeased the big bully on the block… Putin’s Russia!

NBC reports that,

The count of Russian medals stripped is at 13 (out of 33) and athletes disqualified is at 43 in punishments for the nation’s doping scandal leading up to and during the Sochi Olympics.

The IOC banded Russia from taking part in the Olympics however, they allowed the Russian Olympics Committee to take part in the games!

This wasn’t punishment for cheating… this was a wink and nod. The Slate article goes on to say,

In 2016, a whistleblower implicated Russia in a massive state-sponsored sports doping scheme that completely tainted the country’s dominant performance at the 2014 Sochi Games. According to Grigory Rodchenkov, who had run Russia’s so-called anti-doping lab in 2014, Russian operatives had spent the Games secretly swapping out tainted urine samples for clean ones. “People are celebrating Olympic champion winners, but we are sitting crazy and replacing their urine,” Rodchenkov told the New York Times. The scandal encompassed a dozen Russian medalists from Sochi.

And now they are letting the bully get away with it again!

It is not fair to all the other athletes who followed the rule and they are now being punished for following the rules by not being able to stand on the podium to receive their metals. 

By all rights the US Team should be receiving the Gold!

The Russians should be permanently band from all international competition!

They have shown over and over that they cheat.

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Beijing’s Olympics close, ending safe but odd global moment
AP
By Ted Anthony
February20, 2022



A pile of figure-skating rubble created by Russian misbehavior. A new Chinese champion — from California. An ace American skier who faltered and went home empty-handed. The end of the Olympic line for the world’s most renowned snowboarder. All inside an anti-COVID “closed loop” enforced by China’s authoritarian government.

The terrarium of a Winter Games that has been Beijing 2022 wound to its end Sunday, capping an unprecedented Asian Olympic trifecta and sending the planet’s most global sporting event off to the West for the foreseeable future, with no chance of returning to this corner of the world until at least 2030.

It was weird. It was messy and, at the same time, somehow sterile. It was controlled and calibrated in ways only Xi Jinping’s China could pull off. And it was sequestered in a “bubble” that kept participants and the city around them — and, by extension, the sporadically watching world — at arm’s length.

By many mechanical measures, these Games were a success. They were, in fact, quite safe — albeit in the carefully modulated, dress-up-for-company way that authoritarian governments always do best. The local volunteers, as is usually the case, were delightful, helpful and engaging.

[…]

Internationally, many critiqued them as the “authoritarian Olympics” and denounced the IOC for holding them in concert with a government accused of gross human rights violations against ethnic Uyghurs and Tibetans in its far west and harsh policies against Hong Kong democracy activists off its southeastern coast. Several Western governments boycotted by not sending any official delegations, though they sent athletes.

We shall see what happens at the next Summer Olympics which will be held in Paris in 2024 and the Winter Olympics will be held in Italy in 2026.

[/RANT]

Last week’s poll result on is it time to move on from the Olympics.

Fifteen people voted, 3 for keeping the Olympics, and it was a tie for ending the Olympics and holding them at a fixed location with 5 votes each.