Like so many other people who watched the Russian star Kamila Valieva crumble during her free skate at the Beijing Games, Tara Lipinski, the Olympic champion and NBC announcer, woke up still feeling shaken over it.
She had slept just two and a half hours, worried about Valieva, 15, and her 17-year-old Russian teammates, whose raw emotions of devastation, joy and rage were captured on live TV as they navigated the debacle on their own, without any real comfort from adults.
It’s the opposite of how Lipinski felt when she won her Olympic gold medal, at 15.