US figure skaters to receive Beijing gold medals in Paris after two-year legal case

The U.S. figure skating team was officially confirmed as the gold medal winner at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, a sports tribunal ruled Thursday, clearing the way for the team to win medals at the Summer Olympics in Paris.

“We are thrilled to finally honor these incredible athletes,” Sarah Hirshland, executive director 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.”

It has been more than two years since the American skaters left the Beijing Winter Games without a medal of any color. They had finished second in the team event behind the Russians, including teenage star Kamila Valieva, who within hours was implicated in a doping case that took nearly two years to adjudicate.

Now Evan Bates, Karen Chen, Nathan Chen, Madison Chock, Zachary Donohue, Brandon Frazier, Madison Hubbell, Alexa Knierim and Vincent Zhou should come to Paris as official Olympic champions.

On Thursday, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) said three judges had rejected Russian appeals to be reinstated as gold medalists, after Valieva was disqualified and banned for four years in January.

Only after the CAS’s final ruling in the Valieva saga were the American athletes able to secure their well-deserved gold medals and Japan could qualify for the silver medals.

Special medal ceremonies are planned by the International Olympic Committee in the second week of the Paris Olympics to honor athletes whose results have improved as a result of doping cases that have been prosecuted and resolved in recent years. The celebrations will take place in the Champions Park plaza overlooking the Eiffel Tower across the Seine.

“This [CAS] “The decision comes just in time to allow the awarding of gold and silver medals,” the IOC said in a statement.

“We are pleased that this opportunity can be offered to the athletes and teams who unfortunately had to wait a very long time for their medals due to the ongoing legal proceedings,” the Olympic body said. Valieva, who was 15 in Beijing, shone as Russia comfortably won the team event. No medals were awarded because a positive doping test for a banned heart drug, taken from a sample Valieva had provided in Russia six weeks earlier, was revealed on the day the team event ended.

She was acquitted by a Russian anti-doping court, which found her not guilty of contamination by her grandfather’s prescription for Trimetazidine. The evidence was lacking and the World Anti-Doping Agency appealed to CAS.

The CAS’s explanation that Valieva had taken the drug in a strawberry dessert her grandfather had prepared was not believed by that jury. Without Valieva’s scores when she was disqualified, the Russians dropped to third place in the revised results approved by the International Skating Union.

The Canadian team is awaiting the ruling in a separate appeal to the CAS over the revised scores, which ask to be upgraded from fourth to third place, knocking the Russians off the podium. The CAS said Thursday that it is “not possible at this time to indicate” when it will rule on the Canadian appeal.

The World Skating Federation said it “expresses its gratitude to the athletes for their patience and resilience throughout this process”.