In its report, the court panel said it had decided that Valieva could continue skating at the Olympics because she was not to blame for the delay in providing a conclusive result by the Stockholm laboratory that analyzed her sample. That result came just hours before Valieva took to the ice in Beijing for the first time. The court’s lawyers also said that because Valieva is a minor, they had considered the likelihood that she might eventually face only a reprimand, rather than a suspension, if she was found guilty of a doping violation.
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The panel’s commentary was scathing regarding the 44 days it had taken for the Stockholm laboratory to provide the results, noting that Valieva had tested negative twice since then — on Jan. 13 and Feb. 7 — with those results having arrived in a more timely manner. The Swedish laboratory blamed the delays on staffing shortages related to the coronavirus pandemic.
“None of this is the fault of the athlete, and it has put her in a remarkably difficult position where she faces a lifetime of work being taken from her within days of the biggest event of her short career,” the panel wrote in its 41-page judgment.
Still, the panel’s decision was not a verdict on whether the banned drug trimetazidine, known as TMZhad entered her system by mistake, as she contends, or was part of a doping scheme.
The court’s report said that Valieva had failed to provide evidence to back up a claim by her mother, and her legal team, that the positive test might have been the result of contamination through sharing of dishes or drinking from the same glass as her grandfather, who reportedly took TMZ after heart replacement surgery. The court panel, the report said, was provided with no proof of purchase, medical records or prescriptions.