Feb 23
Society Skating on the Edge
When Winning Makes Us Feel Like We Have All Lost
A decade from now we might ask one another, “Where were you during the Olympic Skating debacle of 2022?”
I have never seen anything like it.
If you weren’t watching, go to the end of this PeackockTV replay.
If you can’t access that, here’s an article with some images and commentary. I imagine the International Olympic Committee and NBC are hunting down unlicensed copies now. It is not pretty.
“When I afterwards saw how she was received by her closest entourage, with such…coldness, it was chilling to see this.” — Thomas Bach, President, International Olympic Committee
The Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Defeat
At season-ending championship moments, we, the voyeurs of sport, can’t leave. We watch the losers walk away and the winners rejoice.
It’s a well-established ritual.
NBC Commentator, Johnny Weir, posted this in a Twitter video:
“That was the most bizarre and heartbreaking event I have seen in my entire life.”
If Johnny Weir (Our family’s favorite skating commentator. NBC, please keep him!) describes something as “bizarre,” you better take a look.
The Stars of This Drama
The stars of this drama were mostly children and their coach.
And also the systems.
In our complex, competitive world, we know that the systems create the incentives. They make the rules.
Kamila Valieva —only 15 years old, already the best in the world multiple times over — had just offered the worst performance of her “adult” life in the free skate of the 2022 Olympics.
Valieva finished fourth behind Japan’s Kaori Sakamota, a skater she had beaten by 30 points (a whole lot!) in the team event a week before.
Unable to compete in the 2021 Worlds because she was too young, Valieva was still able to set and re-set multiple world scoring records. She dominated the Russian championships in December and beat her teammate, world champion Anna Shcherbakova, again in the January 2022 European championships, this time by over 21 points.
What had changed in a few weeks?
The day after the Olympic team competition, Valieva found herself banned for a failed drug test taken on Christmas Day 2021. She was provisionally reinstated a day later but was required to appear before an emergency CAS Tribunal.
Rather than simply preparing to deliver another world-best program, she took part in a hurried defense. Valieva, her mother, her grandfather, and her coaches delivered testimony at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Hours before the women’s skating competition, she was provisionally reinstated.
Valieva successfully executed a good short program, finishing first with only one stutter.
Listening to the commentators’ declarations during her performance— that she was unclean, a cheater unfit to touch Olympic ice — we can only imagine the criticism the fifteen-year-old heard over the next day. We know that nasty people have no filter on social media.
In the free skate, having won the right to go last, needing to deliver only a solid performance by her lofty standards, Valieva fell on her first jump and never recovered. Her polished perfection was repeatedly interrupted by bobbles that skating audiences had never witnessed from her.
As Valieva stepped off the ice, her coach, Eteri Tutberidze, confronted her.
“Why did you let it go? Why did you stop fighting? Explain it to me, why? You let it go after that axel.” — Eteri Tutberidze
Valieva began to cry, hiding her face. After the scores were announced, she clutched at her stuffed animal and sought to escape the cameras, to depart the rink, refusing to speak. Sobs were the only sound she could make.
A day later, a spokesmen for the Kremlin, the seat of power in Russia, responded to Thomas Bach, President of the IOC, about his observation of the “coldness” surrounding Valieva after her failure.
“He doesn’t like the harshness of our coaches, but everybody knows that the harshness of a coach in high-level sport is key for their athletes to achieve victories.” — Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin Spokesperson
Dmitry Peskov respectfully disagreed, “Of course we respect his [Thomas Bach’s] opinion, but we do not necessarily agree with him…We are seeing that the athletes are achieving victories. So let’s be proud of our winners, congratulate our medalists.
“Valieva was fourth. But in high-level sport, the strongest wins.” — Peskov
Alexandra Trusova —one of the greatest female skater athletes in the world at age 17— Trusova had just thrown five successful quads, a first in the Olympics.
Winning an Olympic silver medal, she was crying more fiercely than Valieva. Her tears were born of anger.
“Everyone has a gold medal [but me],” she said.
She was referring to the team competition she wasn’t selected to participate in. The Russian team with Valieva had won gold. And now Shcherbakova had earned a gold, too.
“I am not happy with the result. There is no happiness.”
Yelling at one of her coaches, she said, “I hate this sport…You [the adults around me] told me when I get to that [five quads], I will win. This didn’t happen.”
Kaori Sakamoto — Japan’s top skater, an ancient 21-year-old — was shocked to find herself still on the podium, taking third after Valieva’s stunning falls.
She was sobbing tears of joy that sounded more like a child’s despair.
The unthinkable had happened. Without any quads, she had skated a nearly-perfect program and broken through the monopoly of team Tutberidze.
Anna Shcherbakova — 17 years old, 2021 World Champion — had just earned an Olympic gold medal, edging out Trusova with a mere two quads but far more artistry.
“I still don’t comprehend what has happened. On the one hand I feel happy, on the other I feel this emptiness inside.”
After her victory, she sat alone, untouched, for four minutes, with no attention from her coaches or team. Quiet. Finally someone came to offer congratulations before again stepping away.
Left alone, she shed no tears. Her face was calm. An odd loneliness among the storm thrashing around her.
The System Behind the Skaters — Short Version
So why were Tara Lipinksi, Weir, and a host of commentators so determined to have this tiny, seemingly-sincere, 15-year-old girl — who had practiced 12 hours a day, 6 days a week for most of her life — banned from the Olympics?
On February 14, hours before the Women’s Figure Skating competition, the Court of Athletes in Sport (CAS) tribunal provisionally ruled to allow Valieva to compete. After the Olympics, a full review would be held.
The CAS had argued that Valieva’s defense had established its case at the “reasonable possibility” level and approached the “balance of probability” primarily because
- Valieva was a “protected person” under the age of 16.
- Valieva had delivered negative drug tests before and after the positive test in December 2021. The status of her “B” sample was still unknown.
- The report could be the result of a lab error — the same lab that took an irresponsible 6 weeks to process the sample — because the amount of trimetazidine was exceedingly low (2.1 ng/ml) for a test purported to require at least 10 ng/ml to be detectable.
- The low level of trimetazadine seemed odd for a drug that experts suggested needed to be ingested daily for weeks to have any hope for performance enhancement.
- Not allowing Valieva compete may well cause “irreparable harm.”
The commentators were aghast that Valieva was competing.
Their concern was for “clean” sport, for no athelete having an advantage. It was dangerous, they said, for anyone watching to have any doubt about the honesty of the competition, of skating, of the Olympics.
It is clear that many in skating are determined to break the Tutberidze grip on women’s ice skating.
Over the last two World Championships, young women from Eteri Tutberidze’s Moscow gym, Sambo-70, have won five out of the last six women’s singles figure skating medals. Had the 2020 World’s not been cancelled due to Covid-19, Sambo-70 would have likely captured three more medals. In the 2016 and 2017 Worlds, Tutberidze skaters won two golds and one bronze.
The “Eteri bonus” is worth 5 to 20 points.
Many in the skating world deeply believe in the “Eteri bonus”…a mystery box allotment of 5 to 20 points per competition. They immensely resent the Sambo-70 skaters awarded this bonus for the sake of their coach.
Whatever the reason, Tutberidze has enjoyed a stunning run of success over the last seven years. And there are many more young bodies coming up!
The Youth Movement
We have seen brave, young athletes overthrow the elder champions of figure skating before:
- In 1994, the fearless 17-year-old, Oksana Baiul, defeated the elegant Nancy Kerrigan with jump after jump to claim Olympic gold.
- In 1998 the brilliant Tara Lipinski won Olympic gold at the even younger age of 16, beating out the two-time World Champion, Michelle Kwan.
- In 2002, Sarah Hughes won Olympic gold at the age of 17, beating out the 21-year-old Irina Slutskaya and Kwan, eventual 6-time world champion.
Tutberidze, however, has institutionalized the process of youth prevailing.
Her cadre of young skaters have transformed the sport. Their primary competitors for gold are skating next to them every day:
- Alina Zagitova completed a win of gold in every major world title at the youngest age ever, capping her career with Olympic gold at the age of 17.
- Evgenia Medvedeva won her first World title at 16.
- Trusova began tossing quads and medaling in major competitions at 14.
- Shcherbakova won Worlds at 16.
- Valieva jumped to the front of the Tutzberitze pack in late 2021 to win the Russian and then European Championships at the age of 15.
Quads — It’s Just Math
They call it the “ladies quad revolution.”
With up to seven jumps in a free skate, quads add up. A quad jump earns base points of 9.5 to 12.5. A triple earns 4.2 to 8. And a double only 1.3 to 3.3. The surest way to win is with lots of big jumps. Artistry takes you only so far.
A quadruple jump is worth from 4.5 to 5.3 more base points than an equivalent triple jump.
Kurt Browning of Canada completed the first quad jump ever (a toe loop) in a major men’s competition in 1988. Miki Ando of Japan executed the first quad jump (a salchow) in a major women’s competition in 2008.
It took another decade before Trusova became the first to land a quad toe loop in a 2018 woman’s major competition. She soon delivered firsts in three other jump types. Adeliia Petrosian, age 14, executed the first quad loop in 2022. Petrosian is, presumably, Tutberitze’s next tiny star.
Quads — A Little Physics and Biology
There is a price to pay for landing those quads.
Tutberidze athletes must start training when very young, small, and thin.
To achieve the enormous power to weight ratio needed for a quad jump, Tutberidze begins with young, pre-pubescent women. They are prescribed a highly-restricted diet monitored through regular weigh-ins.
Like others, they are accused of taking a known puberty-blocking, anti-menstruation drug, Lupron, and an array of supplements. The Figure Skating Federation of Russia assertively denies these accusations.
Tutberidze skaters have explained that on competition days they are not allowed to drink water because every gram counts.
Sadly for each of the young ladies, their skating careers have ended early.
Katerina Witt won the 1988 World gold at the age of 23. Michelle Kwan won the 2003 Worlds at 22. Japanese champion Sakamoto won the 2022 Olympic bronze at 21.
The “Tutberidze expiration date” is said to be 17.
A short shelf life is no surprise given the impact of 13 to 14-g jumps on skinny ankles, calves, knees, thighs, and hips. A skater’s leg experiences over 1,300 pounds of force each jump, again and again during daily practices.
The tales in social and public media of the breakdowns and early retirement of Tutberidze skaters have been epic, soap operas of the highest order.
Check out this entertaining Beginners Guide to Team Tutberidze.
So, what can we do to fix skating (and the systems in our world)?
Easy Fixes
We modern people are very good at making diagnoses. We have long been trained in scientific management and legal and textual analysis.
Many have already decided on the problems and the solutions:
- Raise the minimum age limit of Senior/World’s/Olympic Women’s Figure Skating to 18.
- Enforce existing anti-doping laws more rigorously, and
- If we want to go out on a limb…encourage an IOC investigation of the Tutberidze gym for child abuse.
DONE! It’s fixed!
Where are our lattes, Twinkie's, and phones?
We gotta post this!
A Deeper Cut
And, yet, there are millions of voices saying it’s time to go a lot further.
“Let’s get rid of the Olympics!”
And while we are at it, let’s toss out the NCAA sham, the National Football League, and the NBA…not to mention the brutal organizations that profit from them…and those darn politicians who seem to be grafting off everything.
With so many extreme sentiments— both the sincere and the mildly comedic — it is hard not to see that more is going on here than just another Olympic skating scandal.
Sure, we can “solve” this little figure skating issue. But I’m pretty certain a lot of folks will still want to blow up the Olympics and “amateur” sports.
It makes me confident that there are deeper issues behind it all.
The Deeper Issues
For many of us, the world feels like it is falling apart. Sport is simply a microcosm of the decay.
Like much about the greater world, sports should be a wonderful thing for people:
- Sport keeps us active and healthy.
- Sport teaches life lessons.
- Supporting young athletes engages a wide swath of our communities: families, coaches, administrators, and towns. And with a world population approaching 8 billion, a lot of folk need engagement!
But despite all that potential, sport seems to be falling apart, too.
The 2022 Olympics have been a rating disaster with over a 40% drop in viewership. The Beijing Olympics have tossed a hint of financial ruin on NBC.
Spurred on by eSports, online gaming, sports gambling, and niche activities, transformation is everywhere across the sport landscape. During the pandemic, a host of collegiate programs were trimmed. The hyper-growth era for American professional and college leagues is long gone.
Kids sports are a really big problem, too.
Parents are desperate to see children engage in activities at the same moment schools struggle to fund programs. High-fee clubs in team sports compete to squeeze out other sports. Individual sports like swimming, gymnastics, and skating demand all of their athelete’s time, feeding the growth of home schooling. And despite all the investment, the participation level of kids in sports remains pretty low.
Why? What is wrong today?
Some of the issues:
We can’t agree on the difference between “working hard” and “cheating.”
There are so many recent examples of the blur between “working hard” and “cheating.” I’ll pick a couple of easy ones from my adopted state of Massachusetts. You can supply your own.
In 2020 the Boston Red Sox went out of their way to re-hire the architect of the historic, Houston Astros 2017 cheating scandal. Per MLB report he was the member of “management” directly responsible for the “*” next to the title.
Upon hearing of the re-hiring, a sports writer asserted that the move showed that Red Sox ownership “intend to try harder next season.”
Cheating big = Trying harder
In the midst of the Tom Brady Deflategate story, Joe Montana (the Greatest Quarterback of All Time before Brady) said very publicly and went into thorough detail about the more innocent tactics his team had used:
“If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying. So the Patriots are trying hard…It’s a game. Everyone wants to win. So you do whatever you can to make it happen.” — Joe Montana
If Jane Goodall (the famed observer of the chimpanzees of Tanzania) dropped from space to consider America in 2022, she might write a chapter about human society teaching “fair play” to its kindergartners while expecting “elaborate cheating schemes” from its top-performing adult organizations.
Skating (and America) has got to get past our pervasive “the ends justify the means thinking.”
We can’t reconcile “old school” vs. “new school” coaching and leadership.
We heard the Kremlin’s words in response to the IOC President: “…everybody knows that the harshness of a coach in high-level sport is key for their athletes to achieve victories.”
These words came from the spokesperson of the Kremlin, the home of the President of the Russian Federation. That President is Vladimir Putin, the world’s wealthiest man and arguably the person with the most unobstructed absolute authority in the world.
Russia is largely “old school.”
In the old school, the coach demands and the athlete complies. The best old school coaches convey an absolute confidence that instills the athlete with the certainty they can succeed. They often do win. (Just look at skating and women’s gymnastics.)
America says it has moved on to a new style of coaching that balances coach and athlete. As with many things, though, well-implemented “old school” ways can work more effectively than poorly-implemented “new school” ways. It takes time to learn and to change.
Given the learning curve, it is no surprise that lots of “old school” coaches and leaders remain across the American landscape. American football, our most popular sport by far, is inherently coach-first.
We pay college coaches $5 million and more a year while offering top athletes relatively little. A coach-first sport.
Old school coaching styles are easy to find, even among younger generations. Leaders may have adopted modern coaching language but have changed their core approach very little.
For some it is about the power: “The coach is in charge, right? How can kids decide what is best for them!”
For others, it is more about training methods: a lot of repetition, a lot of hours, total separation from parental authority. It is simple and effective at producing champions…even if it risks physical and psychological injuries.
Skating (and America) has got to figure out how to instill “new school” respect for all…while keeping the valuable pieces of the “old school” work ethic.
We are struggling more than ever to negotiate “fair matchups.”
It’s a little crazy, but we can’t even agree upon who should be competing against whom. We face two primary challenges:
- Redefining categories that were once agreed-upon: “man”, “woman”, “adult”, “child”, “banned drug user”, and so on.
- Balancing the interests of the rare individual and the typical group.
Many thought it should have been easy to exclude Valieva from the contest as a “banned drug user.” Instead, because she also was a “protected person” under 16, she fell into another category governed by different rules.
How can we apply such different rules to people competing in the same contest?
Many of the athletes in the Women’s Skating Finals wondered, “Why are the rights of Valieva more important than those of 23 ‘typical, rule-following’ athletes?” This was certainly the thinking of the commentators.
The swimming world is debating a different but related situation around the swimmer, Lia Thomas.
In their first three seasons at Penn, Thomas competed in mens swimming competitions. After transitioning, Thomas began competing in womens competitions. A week ago, Thomas won four events at the Ivy League womens championships and is headed to Nationals. Good for them!
There are many, though, who complain that Thomas should not swim in the same category as women competitors.
They ask, “Why are we considering only the rights of Thomas? What about protecting the rights of all the swimmers who finished off the podium? Was that a ‘fair’ competition for them?”
Skating (and America) has got to figure out fair matchups…by whatever set of categorizations is deemed inclusive and reasonable.
Paralympics faces enormous challenges because of the varying statuses of its athletes, but it appears to try hard for inclusive and fair competitions.
We find complexity overwhelming fun and the truth.
Modern humans have made everything so complex that we might never know the truth again.
The anti-doping testing systems are so complex that we cannot process a sample for one competition until the next competition. That we can say that a drug has appeared at a level below which the test is supposed to be sensitive. That for some unknown reason the “B” sample cannot be consulted for verification.
Our rules have become so weighty and complex…this set for these competitors…that set for those competitors…that we spend enormous time debating about how the rules apply in practice.
We heard Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski talking about how they knew their bodies were under a microscope from an early age. They were aware of what chemicals they put into them (so as to avoid failing a drug test), and their parents would call to make certain that a cough medicine would not trigger a test failure.
Sadly, this excess complexity is true for many facets of life. For many of us in work and adult life.
It is a troubling way to live.
Skating (and America) has got to figure out a simple mindset of fair play.
More rules and more processes can feel good at first, but they often make everyone more worn out, more confused, and more angry in the long run. Usually over things that don’t really make the world a better place.
It is hard not to marvel that Kamila Valieva was allowed to compete so as not to do “irreparable harm” to her, a young person.
It sure does look like we managed to do exactly that to her and to a lot of other people, too.
Let’s work together to make better places of skating, sport, and our world.
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I have spent years working in new product and people management.
We can do better! In ways good for all of us.
Be well
