In the end, Valieva was the much gored and bleeding bull left to die a humiliating death before an arena of insensitive zealots.
She is 15!
FIFTEEN.
Kamila Valieva, whose 2022 Olympic performance became a nonstop crucible of expectations, innuendo, and destructive pressure after it was revealed she had failed a doping test before the Games, was in tears after her last performance. Her raw and obvious anguish only grew when she left the ice and her coach, Eteri Tutberidze, immediately began attacking, and interrogating her in Russian in a painful scene that was apparently captured on Russian TV.
“Why did you stop fighting?” Tutberidze asked. “Explain it to me, why? You let it go after that axel.” A sobbing Valieva did not reply. Could not reply
The president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, said it was “chilling” to see the coldness with which Valieva was received by Tutberidze and other Russian skating officials after her performance.
“All of this does not give me confidence in this entourage of Kamila’s,” Bach said, “neither with regard to what happened in the past, nor as far as it concerns the future.”
Friends, I know how unpopular this is, but are no words for how much I despise the body-and-soul destroying machinery of the Olympics. It’s just one more rigged set-up to falsely measure the ”power” of one person, performance, team, government, or country against another—for profit. And don’t kid yourselves, the entertainment value it provides for those in the bleachers is about as wholesome and character-building as a bullfight is for the dying bull.
