We need to redirect our outrage from the 15-year-old ROC figure skater, Kamila Valieva, who tested positive for the banned substance trimetazidine at the Winter Olympics and focus it on her entourage and the International Olympic Committee.
From my experience as an Olympic athlete, who joined the national programme here in Britain as a child, I don’t believe for one minute Kamila Valieva either knowingly took a banned substance or conceived the idea to dope. Until you are 16 years old, responsibility for what you take lies squarely with your coaches and medical team.
You conform to their advice even when you are an adult athlete, but as a child, your trust and compliance is magnified tenfold.
We also need to abandon any idea that doping athletes or their entourage can make so called “honest mistakes”. There are no honest mistakes relating doping. Other than being spiked, there are two types of doping - deliberate cheating or gross negligence.
All athletes have access to various extremely user friendly, accredited websites, where you can find out in seconds whether a product or specific substance is banned or not.
There is no “I had a cold so I took a Lemsip and I couldn’t have imagined it contained a banned substance” – that’s rubbish. It is hammered into you no matter what, you check every medication, supplement, shake, or whatever on the banned substance data base.
If it is banned, you obviously go nowhere near it. Even if it is allowed, you personally record the products name and batch number, so that if you test positive for a banned substance, you can go back and batch test everything to see if there was contamination.
It will seem a strange comparison, but being an athlete is a bit like being a petrol station forecourt attendant. An athlete may forget their equipment, be late for training, fall in competition or make all manner of honest mistakes.
A petrol station forecourt attendant may mistakenly over charge someone for their pack of chewing gum, fill a car up with the wrong fuel or forget to age check a minor- but they don’t ever allow an open flame on the forecourt. That’s because that could potentially be the end game - catastrophe, kaboom.
Mistakes can be made, but mistakes of that magnitude are never made. That’s like an athlete “mistakenly” taking a banned substance – it doesn’t/wouldn’t happen.
I sympathise greatly for the situation Kamila Valieva finds herself in and whoever is responsible within her entourage needs a lifetime ban from all sport.
I say that whilst recalling a scene from the Martin Scorsese film Casino, where three slot machines Jackpot within 20 minutes of each other during a scam and mistakenly the casino pays out.
Robert De Niro’s character, Ace Rothstein, promptly sacks the pit boss stating, “If you didn’t know you were being scammed, you’re too f*****g dumb to keep this job and if you did know, you were in on it, either way, you’re out!”
The IOC also need to shoulder significant responsibility as their completely inadequate punishing systems provide little to no deterrent in the fight against doping. The current situation is pathetic and faith in the Olympics is waning and justifiably so!
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