At least the Norwegians are happy. Ruddy of cheek and hearty of lung as they ski and skate and slalom happy in the knowledge that they ride high on the lists of the wealth of nations but also, as things stand, rank first on the medals table at the Olympics in Beijing, which is experiencing a long winter of discontent.
For those of us stuck on the western edge of Europe, where the mere rumour of snow is enough to provoke drastic warnings from the good ship Met Éireann and snap school closures in the Alpine regions of Connacht-Ulster, the winter Olympics are something of a mystery.
All that whiteness and blue sky. It’s always been a television spectacle and its most memorable moments often have nothing to do with technical perfection. No, it’s the stories that steal the show: Nancy and Tonya, the Miracle on Ice, Eddie the Eagle Edwards and the Jamaican bobsleigh team, the spectacular falls and crashes.
But there was something elementally dark about the fall that will define the benighted fortnight in Beijing, when the 15-year-old Russian skate prodigy Kamila Valieva fell twice in quick succession on what was supposed to have been the routine that confirmed her gold medal status in the final round of the women’s singles figure skating.
Immediately afterwards a nearby camera caught Eteri Tutberidze, the teenager’s notoriously demanding coach, removing her Covid mask all the better to reprimand the distraught skater for not fighting through her routine.
The moment provoked an instant response, from audiences watching around the world, from former skaters towards commentators and, most surprisingly, from IOC president Thomas Bach, an administrator who has never strayed far from the vanilla safe lands of soft-absorbent diplomacy.
In what amounted to a radical criticism by his standards, Bach declared himself “very disturbed” after he watched the competition on television by the frosty attitude of the Russian coaching staff towards the stricken athlete. “It was chilling to see this,” he said.
While he was ostensibly talking about the events in the actual final, it’s hard not to escape the sense that some part of Bach was responding to the general grotesquerie of Kamila Valieva’s entire Olympic experience.
Harsh words
The political backdrop to the Beijing Olympics was ugly and mutinous, with American and Chinese interests trading harsh words over the welfare of the tennis star Peng Shuai, a concern quickly eclipsed by the international alarm at events on the Ukraine-Russia border.
Nothing about the Beijing games feels natural or joyful, from the $60 million spent on artificial snow to the desolate sight of its grandstand events taking place without the noise – and background colour – of spectators. In 2008 the Beijing summer Olympics was broadly greeted as China’s debutante event: an overdue show by an awakening economic titan. These Olympics were promised as a model of efficiency but the costs, at almost £9 billion, have escalated.
And what has it amounted to?
Happy Norwegians, yes, and there is nothing wrong with that. But when this fortnight is distilled, as all Olympic events are, into a single image or moment, it is to the general betrayal of a 15-year-old child that will be remembered.
Without question Valieva was placed in an unconscionable position by the Russian federation after a drug test she had submitted returned three positive substances, one of which was banned in competition.
The inevitable back-and-forth between the World Anti-Doping Agency and the Russian Anti-Doping Agency, the blizzard of condemnatory coverage, the decision by the Committee for the Arbitration of Sport to allow the athlete to compete all overlooked the appalling truth that all of this pressure was coming to bear on a 15-year-old – who already carried the huge expectation of claiming gold.
The wonder was not that she fell down on the ice on Thursday night. It was that she found the resilience to skate her routine in the first place.
Russian camp
The Valieva story is a very familiar pageant. A brief synopsis of her life suggests a life of extraordinary accomplishment and very little free time. By age six, she had moved from Kazan to Moscow to join the hothouse of misery that would take her to this point.
After the positive drugs testing came the explanation from the Russian camp: that the girl’s grandfather used a medication for a heart condition…perhaps a contaminated glass, perhaps a trace on the counter. Apart from making the grandfather feel like absolute hell, this argument achieved nothing. Valieva went into the Olympics under an intense glare of suspicion directed perhaps at the sports culture of Russia but felt and experienced by her alone.
If she had won gold, the IOC declared, there would be no medal ceremony until after. Then she slipped and saved the Olympics the embarrassment.
Gliding across the ice, Valieva becomes something impervious to age. What she does is unfathomable to the vast majority of people on earth. But as soon as she stepped off the rink the truth that all of this was happening to a mere child became apparent to everyone.
So Bach spoke his words and although he couldn’t say this, unless he wanted to do some kind of Peter Finch in Network act, you have to conclude that he must have seen, in that moment, that there is a sickness running through the Olympic movement: that all the brilliance and the heart-warming stories and the doves can’t disguise the essential immorality of placing a child in a predicament like this, with all the world watching and nobody to lend a hand of comfort when it was needed.
Thomas Bach can’t say it but deep down, like the watching world, he must have known that everyone connected to the big Olympic carnival should, at some level, share in the shame.”
