Katie Uhlaender lost a medal to Russian doping. She isn't sure much has improved since
BEIJING – There is an inherent contradiction in the way American skeleton racer Katie Uhlaender loves being at the Olympics and the lack of faith she has in the organizations tasked with keeping the competition clean and fair.
It is part of what she calls the “duality” of being human, knowing she was cheated out of a bronze medal at the Sochi Games in 2014 while also respecting the competitor who beat her by .04 seconds but was later implicated in Russia’s state-sponsored doping scandal. It explains why she keeps coming back – this is her fifth time now – despite wondering if the system that’s supposed to protect athletes like her will ever work.
“It just shows there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes that exists at the same time of the Olympics being so amazing and inspirational,” she said. “There are other things at play that can take away from that. As an adult, I know these darker layers exist. But at the same time, my passion for sport is there so I came back trying to focus on that and I think I’m succeeding at that.”
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It would be a remarkable, full-circle moment for Uhlaender if she could pull off something special Saturday and win the medal that was taken from her for good when the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) overturned Elena Nikitina’s lifetime ban in February of 2018 and let her keep the bronze from Sochi. Nikitina was one of 28 Russian athletes for whom the CAS ruled there was insufficient evidence to establish anti-doping violations.
That wrong may never be righted in Uhlaender’s mind, but a medal in Beijing is not out of her reach. Halfway through the women’s skeleton race, she sits in eighth place, half a second behind the leader Jaclyn Narracott of Australia, but only three-tenths out of third place on a tightly bunched leaderboard heading into the final two runs that will take place in different conditions Saturday evening.
“At national championships one year I went into Day 2 almost six tenths back and I won, and this is a track where anything can happen,” said Uhlaender, who won the World Cup title in 2007 and 2008. “Also we haven’t slid at night so it’s going to really depend on if their coaches actually know how to prep them for the cold ice. Fortunately, I know how to prep myself for the cold ice. I think I’ll fare better on the cold ice. It’s going to be a good race. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. I’d like to have been a little closer, but I think I closed the gap a bit and I hope I can continue to do that.”
No faith in the system
As Uhlaender came off the track Friday, it was impossible to ignore her career arc in the larger context of what’s happening at the Beijing Games.
Shortly before Uhlaender’s second run, the International Testing Agency (ITA) confirmed that figure skater Kamila Valieva tested positive for metabolic agent trimetazidine, putting Russian doping into the spotlight once again. Though the sample was taken Dec. 25, the positive test didn’t come to light until Tuesday after she helped the Russians win the team figure skating gold medal.
The details and questions about why it took so long to get the positive result and whether Valieva can compete in the women’s individual skating event will be litigated over the coming days and weeks. But the fact it even came to this points to a reality that Uhlaender has been screaming about since 2018: Whatever the IOC is doing to protect clean athletes just isn’t working.
“Even being here in China, I’m like they have the ITA here and all these people but how do we really know what’s going on behind the scenes?” she said. “It’s not independent. None of this is independent. It’s all run by the IOC. It’s really difficult to have faith in the system that failed so hard in 2014.”
Uhlaender proposes some type of independent commission for athletes because, she says, protection for competitors is what gets lost in the nexus between the IOC, the World Anti-Doping Agency and the International Testing Agency.
For example, she said she has been drug tested four out of the last five days, including having blood drawn twice within a 12-hour period. On one occasion, the testers came an hour before she was supposed to get on a bus for training, which is a 40-minute process. It is her responsibility to comply under the WADA code, but there’s nobody to enforce her rights.
“And what’s the chain of custody?” she said. “That’s why I chose not to race in Sochi again (for a World Cup race) because they weren’t compliant, and how do I know, where’s my sample going? The ITA was like, ‘Oh, we’re here independent hired by the IOC.’ Is that independent?”
'We need someone here to protect us'
It’s a fair question in light of the small price Russia has paid for its transgressions, including in this figure skating mess where Valieva remains eligible to practice based on a ruling by the Russian Anti-Doping Agency disciplinary committee. That means the IOC is going to need a favorable ruling from the CAS – the same body that mitigated so many Russian penalties in 2018 – to ban her from competition.
Meanwhile, the endless loop of cheating goes on. And despite the lid getting blown off the Sochi scandal, it doesn’t appear much about the process has improved since then because fundamentally, Uhlaender said, you cannot promote the Olympic movement and regulate it at the same time.
“We need rights,” Uhlaender said. “We need someone here to specifically protect us for our health and safety not just for situations of people like myself that lost out on a medal. Think about it in the aspect of, they chose to give Russia back the medals after they stripped them. That doesn’t protect the athlete. Because that’s why Russia cheated in the first place.
“I’ve seen a lot of propaganda (about improvement). I think there are really good people in the system that want to help and they believe in the athletes and they believe in the Olympic movement. That’s where the athlete and promotion of sport overlap. That’s the cool thing, we are just interested in sport we don’t want to hear about all this other stuff. But I don’t think the system is built to change until athletes have protection. It’s all going to stem from us having rights because we don’t have a seat at the table right now.”