Asterisk and arguments await as Kamila Valieva faces figure skating finale

The strains of Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ will echo around an Olympic figure skating arena again on Thursday night, but it will be met with little of the acclaim that greeted Torvill and Dean’s unprecedented string of sixes 38 years ago almost to the day.

The free skate routine of 15-year-old Kamila Valieva, nicknamed ‘Miss Perfect’, should be strong enough to see her to convert her narrow lead after the short programme into a victory which will be greeted, not with a gold medal and a flower ceremony, but an asterisk and a stack of unanswered questions.

The extraordinary sanction by the International Olympic Committee – which also applies to the team event in which Valieva competed last week – has been applied pending the outcome of an investigation into a positive test she submitted for the banned heart medication trimetazidine on Christmas Day.

Valieva scored 82.16, her lowest of the season, on Tuesday night, but it was still enough for top position ahead of fellow Russian Anna Shcherbakova. She will include three quad jumps in her free skate programme, a standard of which only Valieva and her compatriots, Shcherbakova and fourth-placed Alexandra Trusova, all of whom hail from the same Sambo-70 club in Moscow, can conceive.

Not only will the medals not be presented if, as is virtually certain, Valieva finishes in the top three, but the IOC confirmed an asterisk would be applied, at least temporarily, beside her name in the record books.

“There will be an asterisk about the results on Friday because they will be preliminary,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams confirmed at his daily briefing on Wednesday morning.

“This case has not yet concluded and the CAS (Court of Arbitration for Sport) have made that very clear. In fact, as far as I