The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has disqualified 17-year-old Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva after she was found to be doping at the 2022 Beijing Olympics.
Monday's (Jan. 29) decision meant that she would be stripped of her gold medal and would be banned from competing up until December 2025, seven weeks before the next Winter Olympics in Milan.
This also meant that silver medalists USA, bronze medalist Japan, and fourth place Canada would be upgraded to gold, silver, and bronze, by the International Olympic Committee, respectively.
Previously, the IOC decided not to present any medals for the team figure skating event Valieva won hours before her positive test for trimetazidine - a banned heart medicine - was revealed.
CAS Finds Valieva Guilty of Doping
The CAS said it upheld the appeals of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which asked the court to disqualify and ban the teenage skater from the Olympics after a Russian sports tribunal cleared her of any blame, the Associated Press reported.
Valieva's lawyers argued that she was contaminated by traces of the trimetazidine medication they said her grandfather used.
"Having carefully considered all the evidence put before it," the court said in a statement, "the CAS panel concluded that Ms. Valieva was not able to establish, on the balance of probabilities and on the basis of the evidence before the Panel, that she had not committed the (doping violation) intentionally."
The judges also decided that, according to Russian anti-doping rules, the young skater could not benefit from having been a minor at the time of the positive test.
Valieva's case caused a stir after her sample, taken six weeks earlier at the Russian national championships, was not notified by a laboratory in Sweden until hours after she competed in the team event on Feb. 7, 2022.
