On February 7, 2022, with the end of the women's singles free skating of the figure skating team competition at the Beijing Winter Olympics, the gold, silver and bronze medals in the team competition also belonged. The Russian Olympic team won the gold medal in the team event undisputed with a lineup of four top athletes in the event. Although this is the third Olympic Games in Russia under the name of "Russian Olympic team" since the doping scandal in Russia came to light, Russia's dominance in many ice and snow sports has not been affected. When The Russian 15-year-old Kamilla Vallieva easily landed one difficult jump after another on the field, the audience could not help but marvel at it.
Camilla Vallieva
However, the medal award was not held as scheduled, and rumors spread for a while. A few days later, rumors and insider information narrowed down the suspect athlete step by step, and finally there was clear news that Camilla Valyeva had the banned drug trimetazidine in a urine sample at the All-Russia Championship on December 25, 2021. For a time, public opinion was in a big uproar. However, for all fans and industry insiders who have been following figure skating, the news is not so much a sudden occurrence as a clue. Most of the figure skaters are slender girls, dancing to the music like little people in a circle in a music box, and it is often not themselves who control the music box. When the controversial coaching staff and the Russian Figure Skating Association finally came to the fore from the shadows, figure skating, which looks beautiful, how much shadow can be tolerated and hidden has also become one of the focus issues of this Olympic Games.
Let's start with two short stories. Before the start of the Beijing Winter Olympics to the present, the name Yusheng knot string hovered on Weibo hot search almost every day. But the same figure skating champion at the last Olympics, when people who almost never watched figure skating asked "Where is the feather string?" When no one asked "Where is Alina Zagitova?" The second story is actually a joke: seeing the 15-year-old athlete Camilla Vallieva, many passers-by were amazed: Wow, this child is so powerful at 15 years old, how fierce it should be at 20 years old! And ice fans will firmly tell them: No, you won't see her at 20.
Legendary figure skating club
What walieva, who won the silver medal in figure skating women's singles at the last Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, zagitova, the gold medal, and Walyeva, who won the gold medal in women's singles at this year's Beijing Winter Olympics, have in common is that they are all Russian figure skating women's singles athletes, and they are the same figure skating club, the same coaching staff. The figure skating club named Sambo 70 is located in Moscow, and the head coach is Eteri Tutberidze, because of a light blond wavy curl that resembles instant noodles, and is nicknamed "Face Sister" by Chinese ice fans. This club under sister Face has been a specialty talent girl for nearly a decade. The team has successively brought out Yulia Lipnitskaya, who won the team gold medal at the 2014 Winter Olympics, Yevgenia Medvedeva, the 2016 and 2017 world champion Yevgenia Medvedeva, the 2018 Winter Olympic women's singles champion Alina Zagitova, the 2021 world champion Anna Sherbakova and other talented girls who quickly occupied the commanding heights of the score at the age of fifteen or sixteen, and so on.
These girls often appear in the youth group competitions at the age of thirteen or fourteen, but in the figure skating program, it is stipulated that they must be at least 15 years old to enter the adult group, and when other little girls stumble into the adult group, these girls who frequently play satellites in the youth group to break the record are quickly blooming with great brilliance. Unfortunately, however, these firework-like genius girls will also quickly dissipate like fireworks and fade away. So far, most of the talented girls who appear in this coaching team have left the stage early with injuries before the age of 20.
Alina Zagitova
Where was Alina Zagitova, the last Women's Singles champion of the Winter Olympics? She was promoted to the senior group at the age of 15 in 2017, won the Olympic championship in 2018, entered quasi-retirement at the end of 2019 at the age of 17, and is now 19 years old and is working as a sports host on TV.
Of course, the Russian media themselves have said that it doesn't matter if they are fifteen-year-old geniuses, they can only remain competitive for two or three years.
After all, no one is always fifteen, but there are always fifteen.
To say, in the early years, the most dominant figure in the women's singles event of figure skating was actually the United States, and the name of Guan Yingshan, a Chinese player who won the gold medal at the five-time World Championships, is still thunderous. But after the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, the United States lost its dominance. Although Russia has always had a tradition of figure skating, the biggest advantage has always been pair skating and ice dance, and in the single event, men's single skating is much stronger than women's. In recent years, the dominance of the Russian women's singles company and the fierce competition within are a sight that has not been seen in decades.
In recent years, the high-level competition of women's singles players has begun in the "Golden Cat War" between Japan's Asada Masayoshi and South Korea's Kim Yeon-in. After almost a decade of the war, about the beginning of the Sochi Winter Olympics, the Russian women's singles force has sprung up, especially the Sambo 70 players, who have become the ceiling over the figure skating women's singles event with their fault difficulty advantage and strong stability. Women's singles players from other countries, even if they have strength and talent, are often powerless to face this ceiling. In the mouths of ice fans, non-Russian women's singles girls are jokingly said to be "washing the feet" of Russians.
The large number of Russian women's singles has led many technical trends in continuous internal competition. To give an example that the most obvious passers-by can also understand: usually the jumping posture of figure skating is to wrap their arms around their shoulders and tighten their whole body into a pen to shorten the axis of rotation as much as possible, but the Russian girls under Lisze began to use a one-handed or two-handed posture in the jump, leading a storm. Because this gesture theoretically raises the body's center of gravity, it can also explain the high score they get by jumping. In the 17-18, 18-19 season, almost all the women's singles players in the Russian youth group raised their hands to jump, plus their names are generally long and difficult to remember, so in order to save trouble, Chinese ice fans have numbered them one by one, taking the nicknames of "lift one" and "lift two" all the way to "lift seven". Of course, times have changed, and these girls, who were only thirteen or fourteen years old at the time, may now only have "two to lift" and occasionally appear in the Russian domestic arena.
Another world-leading technology for the Russian women's singles, or more accurately, the Sambo 70, is the hip hop. The men's single skating process of conquering the jump around is quite long. The first four-sided jump, completed in 1988 by renowned Canadian player Kurt Browning, is the back-to-back ice jump of the five types of jumps that are generally considered the simplest. After that, more and more contestants began to learn to jump around, and it also became an important difficulty configuration for men's singles programs. However, it was not until after 2015 that the appearance of multiple types and multiple four-week jumps in a show became the usual configuration for top men's singles players. The four-and-a-half-jump has not yet been successfully challenged.
In the women's singles field, although there have always been people trying to jump around, there has not been a successful example of the adult group for a long time. In 2002, 14-year-old Japan's Mihime Ando, who was still in the youth category, was the first female athlete to complete the four-week jump. But after entering the adult group, she did not succeed again. For up to 15 years, no female player was able to complete any kind of four-way jump in the competition. However, in 2017, 13-year-old Alexandra Trusova completed a four-week jump with less than a few weeks in the youth group. In 2018, she and her peer Anna Serbakova both completed the Four Weeks Of Foot Jump in an international competition certified by the International Skating Union, and are recognized as the most difficult hookers. In 2019, the Kazakh adult group player in the same group, Elizabet Turshenbayeva, tried the four-week jump for the first time in the adult group competition. After that, the talented girls who can jump around and can complete a variety of kinds of four-way jumps in the competition have mushroomed, among which the ones who can fully master the four-way jump and complete it more stably in the competition are Russian girls.
This trend of technological progress has sparked widespread discussion across the globe. Jumping around is a very difficult technique, in order to complete multiple rotations, a very high jumping speed and jumping height are required, regardless of whether the ice fall is successful or not, it will cause a strong impact on the body. Jumping requires a lot of long and repeated training to master accurate jumping and falling ice methods, and if there are only a few successful jumps in practice, few people will risk using it on the field. That is to say, all the contestants who dare to use difficult jumps in the show, whether they want to try their luck or not, have experienced hundreds of practices in ordinary times.
And these girls who can show excellent and stable jumping around are all teenagers.
This is a point that many people in the industry criticize. Jumping in figure skating, no matter which leg is used when jumping, it is the usual leg to fall on the ice when falling on the ice (for most people, it is the right leg, and the left leg is the left leg for a small number of players who rotate in the opposite direction of others), which means that the same leg will be repeatedly impacted. Although most of the difficult jumps are initially practiced with a fishing rod-like boom, you still need to come by yourself later. For young girls whose development has not yet ended and whose bone development has not been completed, will the high-intensity training of jumping around affect their bodies in the future? Will it increase the chance of injury? Will it affect their lives after retirement? Raphael AlutYuyan, coach of St. St. Nippon Olympic men's singles champion Chen Wei, has asked: "What will happen to them when they are forty years old?" Will they already need hip replacement by then? "Some coaches will even deliberately limit the number of times their students can practice four-week jumps, but because Russian girls have begun to produce stable four-week jumps in batches, players from other countries who still have a sense of competition have to start practicing for four weeks. Some famous players, such as Japan's Kihei Ewha, suffered a fracture and injury this season and were unable to play all season.
And jumping around is just part of the story. To maintain stability on the field, players must practice diligently off the field. The secret of the success of the Tu special Lize coaching team has always been famous in the world is "as long as you don't die, you will practice to the death", and the amount of training is extremely large. Many of the players who came to the short training, including The Silver Medal in the Men's Singles at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics and the Bronze Medal in the Men's Singles at the Winter Olympics, Masama Uno said that they could not adapt to the training volume of the coaching staff. High-intensity training ensures the proficiency of the players on the playing field. All the talented girls under Coach Lize have high stability and rarely make big mistakes, which is also one of their winning magic weapons. But again, we still don't know what the consequences of such high-intensity training will have for children who are still underage.
There will always be someone fifteen years old
But why are they all teenage girls? Why does it have to be fifteen?
If you know a little about some of the technical scoring items, it is easy to hear one word: developmental off.
Development is part of puberty for the average person, but for many female athletes in gymnastics, diving, and figure skating, it's like a countdown to bad luck. These are projects that require very high control of the body, and when the female physique grows from a little girl to an adult woman, the structure of the body, the state of the muscles, the center of gravity, etc. will change greatly, so after development, many of the previous techniques and movements will encounter difficulties, and sometimes it is almost necessary to learn all the movements again. Even if the young and famous players, many people will become technically unremarkable after passing the development level, and even disappear from the crowd and withdraw from the competitive stage. So Sambo 70's basic response to the developmental level is: take advantage of the development before the results, and then hurry to retire.
Of course, if the training method is appropriate and the technical foundation is good, you can still survive the development level and continue to play on the field. Italy's Carolina Costener, who won the bronze medal in women's singles at the Sochi Winter Olympics, was born in 1987 and has been competing in the senior division since 2002. The last time she attended the Winter Olympics was in PyeongChang four years ago, when she was 31 years old. The representatives of the previous generation of women's singles, Asada Masayoshi and Kim Yeon-na, were both 19 years old when they first participated in the Olympic Games, and Asada was active on the field until he was 26 years old. The most inspirational of the fiercely competitive Japanese women's singles is Akiko Suzuki, who stood out from the talent-laden all-day championship at the age of 24 and won the Olympic qualification. She did not retire until she competed in her second Olympic Games at the age of 28, when she won her first national championship. Speaking of the late-blooming example of figure skating, we have to say 1999 world champion Maria Butterskaya. The Russian skater nicknamed "Big Kaya" was 27 years old when she won the World Championships, the oldest figure skating women's singles world champion to date, and she was 29 years old when she last won the European Championships, the oldest record for a Women's Singles champion at the European Championships so far. That is to say, compared with gymnastics, which is generally a sport with young athletes, figure skating is not a sport that is not suitable for older players, in fact, sometimes older players have certain advantages, and the women's singles skaters of the previous generations in Russia are also a model of "super long standby".
Maria Butterskaya
In the figure skating event, the older athletes have the advantage of the second item in the score, that is, the program content score. Figure skating is not exactly a sport that purely pursues "higher, faster and stronger". After the scandal of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, the score system of figure skating has changed from the original 6.0 system to the current scoring system, which objectively encourages players to pursue higher technical difficulties and strive to stand out in the arena full of famous players. However, what has always been indispensable in figure skating is artistic beauty. The upright and graceful posture of the contestants, the coordination of the body dance movements, the interaction with the music, and the interpretation of the program are all part of the figure skating performance. In this regard, although there are also talented and mature interpreters from an early age, overall, older and more experienced players have a clear advantage. At the same time, because the most basic skating skills of figure skating will gradually improve with age, older players can often use ice knives to make smoother and lighter movements. This is, of course, only a universal rule, and it is different for individual players.
Of course, this involves another problem: some figure skaters in the scoring event will have an advantage in scoring. Although this trend is not inevitable, and it is common for players from small countries without a figure skating tradition to emerge and be appreciated (such as Kim Yeon-in in South Korea, Dennis Tan in Kazakhstan, Javier Fernandez in Spain, etc.), we often see some ice and snow powers, such as the United States, Canada and Russia, who are more tolerant of overall preferential treatment in terms of more subjective program content. In the women's singles event, the clearest thing is that Russian players often get very high program content scores in the first year of promotion, and many famous players in other countries, even players who have mature performances, have always been known for their artistry, and who are widely praised in the field of figure skating, are difficult to get the same high scores when they retire. This scoring trend also makes a large number of ice fans unable to understand it. Presumably there are many reasons, some have to do with politics, some have nothing to do with it, but objectively, this makes Tusit Lisze's coaching composition a factory that can stably produce talented fifteen-year-olds, and these fifteen-year-old girls don't need to wait until the day when the performance is more mature to get points in all aspects of the performance. Medvedeva set a new world record ten times in just two or three years after her promotion. This, of course, is because she had the highest difficulty at the time. But it should also be noted that the content of her program is unattainable compared with other contestants in the same field. In women's singles competitions in recent years, we can sometimes even more accurately judge whether the contestants are from Sambo 70 simply by the content of the program.
Aitley Tu Especially Lisa
As Tuti Lize's coaching staff gained more and more attention, and as she had more and more students, some of the players who left Sambo 70 began to share their experiences and thoughts on Sambo 70. The images revealed in these bits and pieces of information have made many people question: Is this suspected abuse? In order to maintain a light body, girls are subject to strict dietary restrictions, and their weight is measured in grams. Choreographers in the coaching staff would even praise one contestant for "just eating two shrimps for dinner," and two runners who had won gold and silver medals at the last Olympics were banned from drinking water during their participation in the Olympics in order to control their weight. French media have interviewed players who used to practice at Sambo 70, and they said that Sambo 70 students will be punished in a lidded trash can because they don't practice well enough, "because the garbage only deserves to stay in the trash can." "Many players have said in interviews that they don't stop training when they are sick and injured, and their standards are not lowered, including Tuti Lize's own daughter.
Behind the glamorous aura, we know that Ulia Lipnitskaya, a team gold medalist who ice buffs thought was a great future for the Sochi Winter Olympics, retired at the age of 19 due to injury and anorexia.
Evgenia Medvedeva, who unfortunately won only silver medals in 2018, left her coaching staff after the PyeongChang Winter Olympics. After several years of struggle, he had to return to Moscow due to the epidemic and soon stopped playing. Earlier this year, she said her spinal injuries had prevented her from making a rotation to the left. She is 22 years old.
In the 2021-2022 Olympic season, there are six talented girls in the coaching staff of Tuti Lize who have the opportunity to participate in the Olympic Games, three of whom suffered serious injuries such as fractures during the season, and two of them missed the Olympic trials in Russia. Meanwhile, the group's coaches and choreographers complained in interviews that a fractured player was not practicing diligently enough.
Prohibition of drugs storm
And all this was once again broken or confirmed by the news of Camilla Vallieva's positive drug test trimetazidine.
Trimetazide is a drug used to treat angina and improve blood supply to the heart, but many athletes have used it as an adjunct to training. In 2014, the World Anti-Doping Organization included trimetazim on the list of banned drugs, which is now classified as a "cardiometabolic regulator" and cannot be used at any time during competitions and usual training. The most famous incident about trimethazine was the storm in 2014 when Sun Yang tested positive for drugs and was banned by the Chinese Swimming Federation for three months. At the time, the drug had just been on the list of banned drugs for four months.
Many people wonder: Does a project like figure skating also require stimulants? Can doping improve results in figure skating competitions?
Doping testing equipment
In fact, this matter is not directly related to whether trimetazin can improve athletic performance, because the main application of trimetazin in sports is not on the field. If the drug is used on the field, it is impossible to be effective without being discovered by the drug test. The efficacy of this drug and the extremely short metabolic rate of only a few hours make it more used in training, because trimetazil will increase the blood flow of the heart, an objective effect is that people are not easy to get tired, and they can withstand more intense training than ordinary people. In layman's terms, it is a double empirical drug. Through extremely intense training, athletes can achieve better training results in the same amount of time and maintain the stability of performance during competition. Of course, on the other hand, the increased intensity of training will also increase the likelihood of injury. Inhuman high-intensity training, superhuman difficulty and stability, unusually high incidence of injuries and short sports lifespans, these factors are strung together through trimetazim into a causal chain, repeatedly making it clear to everyone that their athletic lifespan and their quality of life after retirement are indeed not in the consideration of the coaching staff, everything points to a goal, that is, the immediate results. Russia and Sambo 70 have a steady stream of back-ups, and also guarantee that "there will always be people 15 years old".
Trimetazim is a strictly controlled prescription drug and is not prescribed to minors unless it is specifically necessary, let alone minors who are in good health and do not have heart disease.
Tutezel Lize herself once told the media in an interview that the International Anti-Doping Organization banned mitradazine (another drug that has a similar effect to trimetazil, for which tennis player Sharapova was banned) is incomprehensible, so she needs to find a substitute for a similar effect.
Obviously she found it.
However, it is precisely because Valieva is a minor that this drug ban storm has gone in an unexpected direction.
According to the regulations of the Anti-Doping Organization, Vallieva, who is less than 16 years old, is a so-called "protected person", in which case the punishment for the person who uses the banned drug will be greatly reduced, and the adult responsible for her training, such as coach, team doctor, etc., will face much heavier punishment. The notification of positive drug tests in domestic competitions was affected by the epidemic and was only issued in the middle of the Olympic Games, which also led to the thorny problem of medal ownership in team competitions. So, amid this chaotic legal dispute and procedural issues, on February 14, 2022, the International Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruled that Vallieva should continue to participate in the follow-up competition of the Beijing Winter Olympics.
This arbitration resolution, which allowed a drug-positive player to compete with an innocent player, detonated the entire figure skating world. Most expressed deep anger and dissatisfaction with this. This rare penalty also raises questions: Is the nationality and the association behind the players strong enough to influence what should have been a fair penalty?
The reason why Russia cannot use the Russian flag and national anthem at the 2018 Winter Olympics, the 2020 Olympic Games and this Winter Olympics, and can only participate in the competition under the name of the "Russian Olympic Team" is because of the doping scandal exposed after the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. At the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Russia as a whole did not perform well, so at the Sochi Winter Olympics, the entire Russian delegation participated in a large-scale government-led drug test fraud. These fraudulent acts include the transfer of urine samples from within the anti-doping organization laboratories in Russia, mixed urine, the destruction of samples, the destruction of positive urine samples, etc., and even the dispatch of government agents. In 2016, Grigory Rodchenko, the former director of the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory, provided a wealth of evidence to expose the matter from within. Later, a third party commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Organization independently investigated the Moscow laboratory and released the McLaren Report, which clearly states that from 2011 to 2015, more than 1,000 athletes in Russia benefited from doping. Among the beneficiaries identified in the McLaren Report are figure skaters who won medals at the Sochi Winter Olympics.
Figure skating, which in the field of many laymen who do not seem to need stimulant assistance at all, in fact, there are many players who are indirectly or directly affected by drug testing problems. Carolina Costner, the Italian women's singles player mentioned above, was banned for about two years in 2015 because her ex-boyfriend, race walker Alex Schwarzer, used doping, and she did not actively cooperate with the doping test, but covered up for her boyfriend. South Korea's women's singles player Kim Yi-lin, who participated in the figure skating youth grand prix for the first time at the age of 13, was severely punished for being late for the drug test, and could not be exempted because of his young age. These harsh sentences left one wondering whether Valieva's treatment was too lenient. It is true that an underage player cannot control his training, and has been indoctrinated by the concept of results since he was a child, trying to get ahead in the fierce competition, which is understandable, but banned drugs are banned drugs, and letting positive players participate is unfair to other players, hurting their Olympic experience, and depriving them of opportunities.
Of course, the drug scandal will probably eventually push the International Skating Federation to raise the age of participation in the adult competition from 15 to 16 or 17. Many people in the industry sharply stated that since she could not be as responsible for her behavior and body as an adult, she should not participate in the adult competition.
Is it good as long as it is beautiful?
Figure skating is indeed a very beautiful sport. But one of the problems that inevitably accompanies beauty is that people's aesthetic concepts are often not the same. Under the condition that "beauty" cannot be objectively measured, many subjective factors are allowed to enter the judgment. This gives room for factors outside of competitions and sports to enter. As long as figure skating is still a scoring event, this situation cannot be avoided. But in the case of Vallieva's positive drug test, in the face of such a blatant violation of the rules, we cannot ignore the cruelty behind it with "just beauty", because this is ultimately related to the benign development of competitive sports and the Olympic spirit.
While lamenting these little girls in Russia, perhaps we should consider how to protect them. Acquiescing to unfair competition and watching them prematurely exhaust their health and exercise life by improper means in batches in order to get the "genius girls" factory running is not the way to protect them. Or, when we condemn the Coaching Staff of Tusit lisse and the Russian figure skating freak, we should think of the interests of all the players.
When some commentators lamented in the live broadcast about how much pressure Vallieva had to resist at a young age, I thought of the American and Japanese players who tried their best for the whole team in the team competition but did not win the award ceremony, the women's singles athletes from various countries who could not beat the Sambo 70 players in the past decade, and the little girls who most of the Sambo 70s did not stand in the spotlight and came and went.