Opinion | IOC president Thomas Bach’s tough talk on Kamila Valieva controversy was galling

BEIJING The first time Thomas Bach spoke to the press during these Beijing Games he waved three-time Olympian Peng Shuai back into her cage, just as American-born 18-year-old Eileen Gu became the new face of Chinese sports.

In Olympic parlance, at the end of a Games, that is called a handover: the promise of a new host, leaving the old one behind.

On Friday, Bach met the press a second time, the morning after the ruination of Kamila Valieva. The 15-year-old Russian figure skater had been favoured to win gold despite a positive doping test that popped up during the Games, and she spent the week crying and falling at practice, and she fell and cried in her long program, too. What might be the greatest figure skater ever became a crumpled teenage girl, shoulders heaving, assailed by her coach as she walked off the ice. It was a sick thing to have to watch. If it felt like watching child abuse, it’s because it was.

That scandal has grown so large that it has enveloped these captive Games, and Bach made a special point to address it. He was stern. He sent a message.

“I was very, very disturbed when I watched the performance on TV,” said Bach. “It was chilling to see rather than giving her comfort, rather than trying to help her, you could feel this feeling and this distance. That was a very traumatic experience for such a young woman.”

He alluded to future changes — perhaps an age threshold for competitors, but more likely, equal treatment among all competitors. One reason Valieva was allowed to compete was a Court of Arbitration for Sport panel ruled she qualified as a protected person due to her age; the panel argued she would suffer irreparable harm if she was denied the right to skate. You hoped, afterwards, that it could be fixed.

It was even more notable that Bach repeatedly singled out Valieva’s entourage, and if you were a cynic you might think he had already been assured the people around Valieva were going to be put in the metaphorical trunk of a car. The World Anti-Doping Agency is already investigating the entourage, led by coach Eteri Tutberidze, and Bach signalled an enormous amount of pressure will be put on their role.

The Valieva scandal is so enormous, so visceral, such an acute and painful example of the failures of international sport, that it blotted out everything else. Bach fielded one honest question about China: Stephen Wade of The Associated Press asked about BOCOG spokesperson Yan Jiarong’s performance Thursday, when she intervened in three questions regarding sensitive political issues. Twice, Yan called reports of forced labour for the Uygher Muslim population in China’s Xinjiang region “lies,” and once, after a question about Taiwan — which is called Chinese Taipei at the Olympics, and which is an independent nation China would like to reabsorb — she said, “I want to say, there is only one China in the world.”

It was the final daily briefing for organizers of this authoritarian pandemic Games; it was a moment where masks came off. China flexed in the opening ceremony with a message-sending position for Taiwan in the parade of nations, and a Uygher torchlighter. China flexed again near the end. On Friday, the IOC called on four Chinese-language media members, who asked questions regarding whether it was a successful Games, which Chinese athletes impressed Bach the most, something about the torch relay and technology, and “what are some of the more concrete contributions China’s made to the international movements and in what way can these inform and enlighten the countries and cultures which often find themselves in disagreements, conflicts and evil wars.”

Chinese media has been used to help run out of the clock at every IOC briefing, because Chinese media is not journalism in any recognizable form of the word. This was no different. Bach’s comment on Yan was that BOCOG and the IOC had discussed it, and it was settled.

But Valieva was the story, so Bach talked tough and showed sympathy, and almost made it look like he actually cared. His concern will be the global headline, and hopefully it is the start of some way to protect young athletes, and young Russian figure skaters.

Beneath that headline, you had to marvel at Bach’s gall. The 68-year-old German was a driving force in making sure Russia never missed a Games after running the largest modern day state-sponsored doping program in history; it was a failure of Russia’s anti-doping agency, RUSADA, that ensured Valieva’s test was not processed before she was already at the Olympics. Bach was a driving force in rearranging his alphabet soup of CAS (whose president is IOC made man John Coates), WADA (which has been gradually co-opted for years) and the International Testing Agency, which couldn’t be called the Independent Testing Agency because a Swiss court ruled it was not independent: it was that alphabet soup that spit Valieva out onto the ice.

And unlike the first time he spoke to the press, Bach was not asked about Peng, the Chinese tennis star who was disappeared after she accused a former senior government and Olympic bid official of sexual assault. Instead Bach spoke firmly about nefarious entourages who conspired to ruin the hopes of an Olympic athlete 10 days after he had participated in the public display of a three-time Olympian China has decided to put in a box. If she was a hostage without a ransom, Bach was happy — even publicly enthusiastic — to help the hostage-takers. You might even call him a member of the entourage, if you had a mind to it.

Bach will now give an effusive speech at the closing ceremony before leaving Beijing, and Peng will be a memory, and Valieva will eventually be a memory, and the IOC can decamp to Paris and Milan and Los Angeles and maybe Sapporo and Brisbane, spending a decade in warmer climes.

But we should remember what the IOC did here. You have to give Bach some credit: chilling, it turns out, was precisely the word.