Kamila Valieva, the Russian star at the center of a doping scandal, knew immediately it had all gone wrong.
Her program over, her Olympics over, Valieva broke her final pose with a dismissive wave of her right hand. By then, she was already fighting back tears. Those would arrive in earnest soon enough — the bitter, disappointing, emotional end of more than a week of whispers and insinuations that followed the revelation that she had tested positive for a banned drug.
The women’s free skate had promised to be one of the most-watched events of the Games. But few could have expected its stunning denouement.
For more than a week, Valieva, 15, had been buried under an avalanche of distractions: the integrity of her success and her skills were under attack, as was the character of the adults around her.
She had stepped on the ice wearing the same face she’s worn all week in Beijing: Nearly expressionless, doing her best to block out all the outside distractions, or at least not acknowledge them. Now that her free skate was over, she buried her face in her hands.
As the crowd responded with its loudest applause of the night, her blank expression returned. After a few halfhearted waves, she stepped off the ice to be greeted by her coach, Eteri Tutberidze. They did not hug.
“Why did you let it go?” Tutberidze asked in Russian in a scene broadcast on live television. “Why did you stop fighting? Explain it to me, why? You let it go after that axel. Why?”
Valieva did not reply.
Moments later, waiting for Valieva’s scores, Tutberidze held her arm around the teenager’s shoulders. Valieva had put on a mask by then, but it did nothing to shield her disappointment. The scores confirmed the worst: the world’s best skater, who had finished the short program in first place, had tumbled off the podium completely, her dreams dashed in a series of uncharacteristic stumbles and falls.
Valieva’s two Russian teammates, Anna Shcherbakova and Alexandra Trusova, seemed to struggle to process the news they had won gold and silver medals, their personal moments of triumph marred by the chaotic scene. Shcherbakova seemed unwilling — or unable — to celebrate. Trusova appeared, at least initially, to say she did not want to take part in the victory ceremony. The bronze medalist, Kaori Sakamoto of Japan, was crying by then as well, her achievement producing its own very different outpouring of emotion: joy.
All three would eventually come out for the ceremony, a short time after Valieva’s final skate. Shcherbakova leapt into the air, arms aloft, as she accepted her stuffed animal souvenir, which winners get as a placeholder until medal ceremonies the following night.
“I was feeling a lot of pleasure because I happened to be in the right time and the right place and did the right things — that’s the important thing,” Shcherbakova said. But she quickly, added, “On the other hand, I feel this emptiness inside.”
On NBC, Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir called the scenes around the end of the competition “heartbreaking” and “devastating,” and made clear, over and over, as they waited for Valieva’s scores that they believed it had been unfair — to Valieva, to the other skaters, to viewers around the world — for the 15-year-old to have competed, and especially under the crushing weight of scandal and expectations and everything else.
“She should not have been allowed to skate in this Olympic event,” said Lipinski, a former gold medalist in the event. She added that it had made her angry that the adults around Valieva didn’t “make better decisions.”
“It’s not fair,” Lipinski said as the sobs played out on the screen, for a 15-year-old to have dealt with all of this.
Her colleague Johnny Weir posted a video to his Instagram story soon after the broadcast ended, calling the night the “most bizarre and heartbreaking event I have seen in my entire life.”
“I hope that it is never repeated,” Weir said.
Adam Rippon, who coaches the American Mariah Bell, who finished 10th, used an expletive on Twitter to describe the chaotic end to the competition. And on Russian state television, the commentator Andrei Zhuranko thundered, “Sports officials, you have broken the most talented figure skater in the world.”
Ivan Nechepurenko, Ilya Gurevich and Ilaria Parogni contributed reporting.
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