In just some months earlier than the Beijing Olympics, the singular greatness of Kamila Valieva rose like a whisper swelling to a roar. It was the right Olympic story. Till it wasn’t.
She was a determine skater of simply 15 out of Moscow, however seemingly out of nowhere, when she broke world scoring data repeatedly. An extended-limbed balletic magnificence, she knocked out quadruple jumps as if she had been skipping rope on a sidewalk. The stunning comfortable shapes she shaped together with her arms throughout tough routines had been sufficient to mesmerize an viewers.
When the Beijing Video games started in February with Valieva because the heavy favourite, who knew that this star was extra like a supernova, and able to explode?
She kicked off her Winter Video games by main Russia to the gold medal within the group determine skating occasion. That competitors pits every nation’s greatest skaters and ice dancers towards one another, and he or she rose above all of them, attaining immediate worldwide fame and affirmation.
Skating with the poise of a veteran, she grew to become the primary lady to land two quadruple jumps in an Olympic free skate, and gained the ladies’s element of the group occasion by a large margin. And at such a younger age, too.
Her a lot older Russian teammates praised her, saying that Valieva the ingénue was phenomenally gifted however that the world ought to brace itself as a result of she was simply getting began within the sport.
In entrance of journalists the night time the Russians gained the group occasion, these teammates inspired Valieva to reply questions. Laughing nervously, she fumbled with the earpiece she wanted for the simultaneous translation. For her, it appeared scary, however enjoyable, to be the focus, with each eye and digital camera lens targeted on her — this time, off the ice.
“Extra braveness!” Nikita Katsalapov, the ice dancer and chief of the Russian squad, mentioned to her. “It’s going to be OK!”
When requested the way it felt to assist her Russian group win whereas performing so properly, Valieva mentioned, “It is a improbable feeling.” She mentioned she was dealing with the duty to succeed.
How Valieva would address one of many best and swiftest downfalls in Olympic historical past started to play out subsequent for all of the world to see. In a matter of hours, what was seemingly her greatest day within the sport crumbled into heartbreak, accusations and conjecture.
The day after she led the Russian group to a gold medal, it was introduced that she had examined constructive for a banned coronary heart remedy weeks earlier than the Video games. The cheers surrounding her hardened into shouts about whether or not she had cheated.
And regardless of what her teammates stored saying, it was not going to be OK — not, at the least, on the Winter Video games, the place she got here in as a teenage headliner.
The medal ceremony for the group occasion was placed on maintain indefinitely, and the medals nonetheless — greater than six months later — haven’t been awarded as a result of Valieva’s doping case hasn’t been resolved.
On the Video games, Katsalapov, Valieva’s 30-year-old teammate, mentioned that Valieva was a powerful younger lady and that she would deal with the scenario simply high-quality.
But that younger lady, carrying so many expectations, was attempting to not let the scenario crush her. All through the Video games, Valieva clung to a pink, fuzzy stuffed bunny earlier than and after she skated. After the doping scandal broke, she wiped tears away throughout her practices, and as soon as buried her head into her coach’s shoulder whereas her coach coldly regarded previous her, watching different skaters on the ice.
The gold medal had been Valieva’s for the taking as she went into the free skate in first place. However she couldn’t maintain her composure. Wearing her purple and black costume, hair pulled again right into a slick bun, she didn’t seem like the mature veteran who had skated to Maurice Ravel’s “Boléro” so many occasions with drama and ease.
Whereas the world watched, she turned from champion skater again into a baby, one who regarded misplaced and unhappy as she struggled to discover a rhythm. She barely managed to completed her uncharacteristically mistake-filled efficiency, ending a devastating fourth within the general competitors, and when she stepped off the ice in tears, her coach, Eteri Tutberidze, didn’t hug her.
As a substitute, the coach mentioned in Russian, in a remark that was caught on stay TV: “Why did you cease preventing? Clarify it to me, why?”
Perhaps sometime Valieva will let the world know her reply. Or possibly her comet-quick rise and fall occurred so quick and damage a lot that she’s going to by no means be capable of clarify it. Or need to clarify it.
Maybe these occasions had been swirling round in her head as she jumped and twirled on the ice this summer time, removed from the brilliant lights of worldwide determine skating.
In Sochi, the Russian host metropolis of the 2014 Olympics, Valieva carried out because the lead in a skating present referred to as “The Scarlet Flower,” organized by a former ice dancing champion who’s married to the Kremlin’s spokesman. Russia is the place she is taken into account an Olympic champion, although her group gold medal stays in dispute.
After her closing efficiency within the present earlier this month, she thanked the gang and mentioned, “With out you, the fairy story wouldn’t be a fairy story.”