EFFORTPOST [Effortpost] Olympic Figure Skating Scandal Roundup: Abuse, Anorexia, and Performance-Enhancing Girlpills

Sadly I haven't got a collection of social media chimpouts this time, but it's a good story.

The Scandal

Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva wowed crowds with her performances in the team event. At only age 15, she became the first woman to ever land a quad jump in the Olympics. The Russian team beat all competitors to take the gold.

The drama begins a few days later when the medal ceremony is delayed for undisclosed "legal" reasons. Pretty soon it's revealed that she tested positive for the doping drug trimetazidine in a urine sample she provided 6 weeks earlier. The Russians went through different forms of denial, cope, and seething:

• She's a little girl. Why are you picking on this poor little girl?
• She can piss clean now, so who cares about the past? Training doesn't matter.
• There must have been a conspiracy to delay the test result to humiliate Russia. It's the fault of the CIA, not that we have to send our piss to get tested in Stockholm because nobody trusts us.
• She's Russian so it's okay. That's all that matters. (This is the line Putin is going with.)
• Okay, sure, talk about it all you want, but we might put polonium in your tea.

Her status is still not determined yet. The Court for Arbitration of Sport is expected to rule on whether to ban her on Sunday or Monday. If she's banned then presumably the Russians lose their gold medal in the team event and she's barred from the upcoming individual women's competition.

The Eteri Expiration Date

The Valieva case is drawing attention to an open secret in figure skating: Her coach, Eteri Tutberidze, is a fricking nutcase running a factory that churns out a constant stream of drugged up disposable robot girls.

Women's figure skating has always been pretty fricked-up. In order to jump well, it's important to be strong, light, and not have a lot of injuries. A girl who is thin, hasn't gone through puberty, and hasn't been active long enough to get injured tends to be the optimal body type. Puberty also is a problem because a skater can't perform consistently while they're growing too fast. So you end up with a lot of girls around 15-16 being stars, and they have to go through very harsh training. And sadly many of them end up with lifelong injuries.

Team Tutberidze turns that up quite a few notches. Girls who train under her have repeatedly let slip in front of the media that they're fed only shakes, not allowed drink water on the day of competition, and routinely given all kinds of drugs. The PEDs help them practice far more than their competitors. And the results speak for themselves, both in success on the rink and the curse of the "Eteri Expiration Date".

The "Eteri Expiration Date" is a term coined by figure skating drama enthusiasts who have noticed all of Tutberidze's skaters fall apart by age 17. They fall victim to injuries or defect due to the constant abuse they suffer at her hands. Why do so many get injured? When Evgenia Medvedeva broke her foot, Tutberidze explained that it was her own fault for being too fat. More serious observers note that since her girls practice a lot more, they're taking more impacts to their joints. But why so many broken bones?

Alleged fat girl Evgenia Medvedeva

This is where girlpills enter the equation, or at least one specific kind of girlpill. If Team Tutberidze is taking the puberty-blocker lupron then they can be frozen as little girls for a couple extra years, long enough to get them through the Olympics once. Of course there are side effects, like osteoporosis, hence the broken bones. It would also explain why a lot of the graduates of Tutberidze's horror show end up having to take HRT because their endocrine system is permanently fricked up. And needless to say lots of them have anorexia too.

If your almonds aren't activated enough yet, consider that all the Tutberidze skaters have the same doctor, Filipp Shvetsky. Why an anesthesiologist would be doing sports medicine might seem mysterious until you find out that he does have qualifications. He was caught shooting up 6 members of the national rowing with drugs several years ago.

Drama

I've only begun to scratch the surface of the Tutberidze drama mine myself, but it's worth more investigation. She has repeatedly made catty social media posts bitching about skaters who have gone over to the other important Russian coach Yevgeny Plushenko, Plushenko himself, and Plushenko's wife. When a spokesman for the Putin administration was asked if he had any comment on these catfights, he reportedly replied, "No, I'm a fricking politician." Another reason to hate the regime.

I tried finding social media chimpouts but it was difficult because pretty much everyone agrees that they hate this b-word. The only thing really spicy I came across was Johnny Weir being called out for his fawning praise of Tutberidze and her skaters. Weir is a retired American figure skater best known for co-hosting Olympic coverage in the USA. He is a lifelong Russiaboo and trained there for a while, but everyone is sick of hearing him year after year talking up how wonderful and superhuman Russian skaters are and keeping his mouth shut when we see what makes them superhuman. Of course the irony is not lost on anyone that Weir is extremely over-the-top hyper-gay to the point where it's annoying and he'd likely be literally murdered if he went to Russia and acted that way.

Bibliography

If you'd like to learn about this vast untapped reserve of drama, I'd start with youtuber Paola La. She has done some very engaging and drama-centric videos that were my main source here.

• Beginner's Guide to Team Tutberidze - This is from a year ago but gives a good summary.
• Her take on the doping scandal

Other sources:

• Youtube channel TheSkatingLesson has been following the story closely, but this guy seems to actually care more about skating than drama.
• On the death threats to British journ*lists
• Details on Queen Tut
• Details of why it actually could take 6 weeks to process the piss test
• If you can read Kraut, this is about the doctor