Valieva caught in a complicated mess that has been coming for years

To paraphrase Mario Balotelli, why is it always them?

Was it not enough that Russia corrupted the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi with a devilish scheme that involved Federal Security Service agents passing steroid-riddled urine samples through a mouse hole before swapping them with clean urine? The act was so devious that the International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, later called it “a shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sports and on the Olympic Games”.

Was it not enough that, as the esteemed law professor Richard McLaren found in 2016, the Russian government, security services and sporting authorities colluded to hide doping across more than 1,000 athletes in more than 30 sports – a practice that became state policy after the country’s poor performance at the 2010 Winter Games?

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Even as late as 2019, the World Anti-Doping Agency found Russia had manipulated data from the Moscow anti-doping laboratory to stop investigators banning more of its athletes. That is the reason why Russia is competing under the banner of the Russian Olympic Committee in Beijing, and their anthem is banned.

And now, the greatest tragedy of all. A 15-year-old girl, already perhaps the greatest female skater in history, caught in a complicated mess, as the world’s media pick over the bones of her positive doping test.

It is a tragedy because it is impossible to imagine Kamila Valieva ordering a banned drug off the internet, finding it in a family medicine cabinet, or whatever the explanation might be, and – on a whim – taking it. If trimetazidine was in her system someone must have passed it on, perhaps telling her it