More than two years after competing at the Beijing Winter Olympics, U.S. figure skaters will finally receive their gold medals, upgraded from silver after Russian athlete Kamila Valieva was disqualified for a doping violation. Alexa Knierim, Nathan Chen and Evan Bates share what this moment means to them.
The U.S. figure skating team was formally confirmed as gold medalists from the 2022 Beijing Olympics by a sports court ruling Thursday, opening the way for the team to get its medals at the Paris Summer Games.
“We are thrilled to finally honor these incredible athletes," Sarah Hirshland, chief executive of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, said in a statement. "We are especially excited that the beautiful city of Paris will join us in this celebration.”
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It is now nearly 2 1/2 years and multiple layers of Court of Arbitration for Sport appeals since the American skaters left the Beijing Winter Games without a medal of any color.
They had placed second in the team event to the Russians including teenage star Kamila Valieva, who within hours was implicated in a doping case that took almost two years to judge.
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Now, Evan Bates, Karen Chen, Nathan Chen, Madison Chock, Zachary Donohue, Brandon Frazier, Madison Hubbell, Alexa Knierim and Vincent Zhou should be coming to Paris as official Olympic champions.
On Thursday, CAS said three judges dismissed Russian appeals to be reinstated as the team gold medalist. The Olympic title was lost in January when Valieva was disqualified and banned for four years.
It took the latest CAS ruling in the Valieva saga to guarantee the U.S. team its overdue gold medals, and for Japan to be in line for upgraded silvers.
Special medal ceremonies are planned by the IOC in the second week of the Paris Olympics to honor athletes whose results have been upgraded because of doping cases that were prosecuted and resolved in recent years.
Those celebrations will be in the Champions Park plaza looking across to the Eiffel Tower on the opposite bank of the Seine River.
“This (CAS) decision comes just in time to still be able to make the medal allocation for gold and silver possible" in Paris, the International Olympic Committee said in a statement.
“We are glad that this opportunity can be offered to the athletes and teams who, unfortunately, had to wait for a very long time for their medals due to the ongoing legal case,” the Olympic body said.
Valieva, who was 15 years old in Beijing, starred as the Russians easily won the team event. No medals were presented because a positive doping test for a banned heart medication, from a sample Valieva gave in Russia six weeks earlier, was revealed on the day the team event ended.
She was eventually cleared by a Russian anti-doping tribunal that ruled she was not at fault for being contaminated by her grandfather's prescription for trimetazidine. The proof was lacking, and the World Anti-Doping Agency appealed to CAS.
The explanation at CAS that Valieva ingested the drug in a strawberry dessert her grandfather prepared was not believed by that judging panel.
Without Valieva’s scores when she was disqualified, the Russians dropped to third in the revised result signed off by the International Skating Union.
The Canadian team is awaiting the verdict in a separate appeal to CAS about the revised scores, asking to be upgraded from fourth to third and knocking the Russians off the podium.
CAS said Thursday it was “not possible to indicate at this time" when it will give the Canadian appeal verdict.
The world skating body said it "extends its gratitude to the athletes for their patience and resilience throughout this process.”
AP National Writer Eddie Pells contributed to this report.
