BEIJING — Sarah Hirshland watches Kamila Valieva and sees what we all see: An extraordinary figure skater whose presence here represents, on a fundamental level, a threat to the Olympics.
“When the integrity of competition comes into question in a way like we’ve seen here, you run the risk of compromising the integrity of the entire system,” Hirshland, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee CEO, told a small group of reporters Thursday. “And we’ve got to fix it.”
Mark Schiefelbein/AP
Valieva is a wondrous 15-year-old Russian skater who won the team event, is in line to win gold in the individual event, and whose positive test for the banned drug trimetazidine has cast a pall over the Games.