The lawyers of the Russian figurative skater Kamila Valieva are carrying their doping case to the Court, arguing that the world anti -doping agency retained and altered evidence that could have demonstrated their pollution claim during the audience that It resulted in its four -year suspension.
The experiment conducted by the scientist Marcial Saugy at the request of the Russian anti -doping agency through its channels on the AMA remained secret Until Associated Press revealed details Of that last September, along with Wada’s concerns about it.
“We have a big problem,” Wada director general wrote to his general advisor after learning about the experiment. “How do we have Saugy making an opinion for Valieva, super favorable for her?”
Details of the Saugy experiment on how Valieva could have been contaminated by drinking a strawberry milkshake that made her grandfather never appeared during a five -day hearing in the arbitration court for sport in 2023 in which the Ama was already asked to produce all the material related to the positive test of the skater.
After reading the history of AP about the experiment, Valieva’s lawyers presented an appeal before the Swiss Supreme Court, considered the last, and generally useless, try to appeal CAS decisions, asking for details of the experiment to be launched.
Wada finally provided it, and the AP obtained a copy of the 11 pages of Saugy. Details the thorough lengths he took to see if Valieva’s pollution claim was plausible.
Valieva, now 18 years old, was the head of the team in the team that ended first in the figurative skating event of the Olympic team in the 2022 Beijing Games, but ended with the bronze medal after its result was scrubbing due to positive doping. Its suspension ends at the end of 2025 and The reports are that she will return to the competition on time for the Milan-Cortina Olympic Games next year.
In a presentation this week before the court, Valieva’s lawyers write: “The production of Professor Saugy (Wada) confirms the procedural fraud that motivated the request for review.”
They claim that the Ama did not reveal the experiment to CAS, which would have added a theory for the positive test of Valieva for scarce drug traces and also submitted Saugy to an interrogation at the audience, and when they finally delivered it, it had altered to seem less favorable for Valieva.
Wada spokesman James Fitzgerald said that “any accusation of irregularities by the Wada is completely rejected” and that the agency “would strongly defend its position in this matter.”
He said the report “was not the Ama document to share” and that it would not have been covered by discovery obligations.
“The report was not useful in the case of Mrs. Valieva and, anyway, it would not have any impact on the result, since the Sports Panel Arbitration Court finally rejected the explanation of the athlete’s strawberry dessert, not based on scientific plausibility, but because it was not backed by sufficient factual evidence,” said Fitzgerald.
In cases of contamination such as the one that ruined the 2022 152 -year -old Olympic Games and painted it as the helpless pawn of powerful Russian coaches and sports leaders, the athlete has the burden of testing how the drug entered its system.
Cas arbitrators labeled as “inherently unlikely” the idea that Valieva would have taken the shake that her grandfather made on a long train trip and has eaten it for a period of days.
Saugy did not respond to the AP request for an interview.
In the experiment, the scientist tried to replicate conditions under which the grandfather said he made the shake crushing pills in a wooden cutting table that had not been cleaned.
Saugy made estimates on the amount of waste from the pills, combined with its mixture with the fruit in the same cutting table, it could have finished in the Valieva milkshake said that he drank in a Moscow train to St. Petersburg, where he went to compete in December 2021.
“Depending on the quantity and time of ingestion of this meal contaminated by the athlete, the scenario cannot be excluded,” Saugy wrote about the theory that Valieva could have accidentally ingested the drug.
Saugy also included this finding at its conclusion at the end of the report. But below that section of four paragraphs, he wrote that “the voluntary intake of a trimetazidine dose 4 to 5 days before the anti -doping test is the most plausible scenario.”
When arguing that the report was altered, Valieva’s lawyers say that Saugy’s experiment, which included breakdown of how the medicine metabolizes in a person’s system, did not support the theory that the low amount of the drug in the Valieva system at the time of its positive test could have resulted from the intentional use of the medication.
“This additional conclusion, which is not related to the purpose of the evaluation of experts and the questions raised, contradicts the rest of the report,” said lawyers.
They also point out that the original application, sent by a subdirector of the AMA at the request of Rusada, contains eight questions, while the report only includes Saugy’s answers to the first seven. The excluded question: “How did TMZ enter the athlete’s body?”
“It seems clear that Professor Saugy initially answered this question and subsequently eliminated his comments precisely because they were” super favorable “to Kamila Valieva,” the lawyers argue, repeating the phrase used by the general director of the Wada when he expressed alarm for the experiment.
The Valieva drug tested positive, trimetazidine, is the same that appeared in the systems of 23 Chinese swimmers who were not penalized After Wada accepted the explanation of contamination of that country for its positive evidence.
That case brought hard scrutiny on the Ama – the The United States government stopped paying their quotas For the drug fighting, and the Valieva case illustrates a disconnection between how Ama managed scenarios that involve different countries whose athletes gave positive for the same medication and made similar pollution claims.
The case of Valieva was the last chapter of a saga that, at that time, had prolonged for eight years. It was discovered that Russian sports leaders were deceiving the system at the highest levels, and also Lie to the Ama When he arrived asking for evidence of embezzlement.
The Russian anti -doping agency did not comply with the case of Valieva, which forced him to execute the application of the Saugy experiment through the AMA.
Wada, therefore, received the results of the test, and that the general director Alarmed Olivier Niggli, whose texts to Gunther More Younger, the head of the new Intelligence and Research Unit of the Agency, were seen by AP.
“If it is a Rusada opinion, we should not be involved anyway,” Niggli wrote. “This is a big problem on our side to get involved in such an opinion that it will be used in court. We have to stop that urgently.”
___
AP Olympic: https://apnews.com/hub/winter-olympics
