BEIJING — With the world watching, Kamila Valieva fell just short of the podium.
The Russian skater whose story dominated the Olympics struggled in her free skate, falling from first place to fourth. That dropped her out of medal contention and rendered irrelevant the question of how to award medals to skaters in a competition that would have, as an IOC spokesman put it earlier in the week, an asterisk beside it.
Instead, it was Valieva's Russian teammate Anna Shcherbakova who took gold. Alexandra Trusova, also from Russia, took silver, while Japan's Kaori Sakamoto took bronze.
The 15-year-old Valieva came into the evening with the eyes, and the judgment, of the world upon her.