My Weekend Contemplation

I know the Olympics are over and the history books have closed on another chapter of human excellence. But the Beijing Winter Olympics will also forever know for human cruelty and ineptitude. I’m still not over the women’s figure skating free skate. What a horrible thing to watch, and even more horrible for the girl – and she is very much a girl at just 15 years old – to live through.

Every single adult around Kamila Valieva utterly failed her, and in allowing this to play out also damaged every other athlete competing in women’s figure skating this Olympics. It was terrible to watch Kamila implode alone on ice, even more terrible to hear her coach berate instead of comfort her immediately afterward. Around her her 17-year-old Russian Olympic Committee teammates were either melting down (silver medalist Alexandra Trusova) or left confused and alone (gold medalist Anna Shcherbakova). Again, it was terrible to watch.

It felt like we were watching child abuse live on television. And, honestly, we were. Kamila should have never been allowed to skate. And the “irreparable harm” the Court of Arbitration or Sports hoped to avoid by letting her compete happened anyway, but so much worse.

While the ugliest side of human nature means there will always be powerful who prey on the less powerful, more must be done in the Olympics to keep adults from abusing these children. And, yes, doping a 15-year-old girl with banned performance enhancing drugs is fucking child abuse. That alone would be enough, but the ROC coach Eteri Tutberidze is notorious for her strict, unyielding (read: abusive) molding of a seemingly endless series of teenage champions with preternaturally short careers.

I hope the disaster of the women’s free skate this year makes the Olympics raise the minimum age for its athletes. We know the pressure and burden of international acclaim and expectations that comes with being an Olympian can be too much for adults, let alone children. If we’re serious, as human fucking beings, in confronting mental health in sports (and elsewhere), we first need to take children off the field of engagement.

I fell in love with Olympic figure skating as a kid. I remember the “Battle of the Carmens.” But I fell head-over-heels when Kristi Yamaguchi won gold in 1992. I was an Asian-American kid watching an Asian-American athlete achieve her dreams. I still fondly remember the programs from Kristi and Nancy Kerrigan and Midori Ito like it was yesterday.

But the thing about those champions is that in the 1992 Olympics they were 20, 22 and 22, respectively. And then Nancy went on to win another silver (after some, um, whacking drama) four years later, at age 26. That’s unheard of, a champion contending for the gold at age 26? Now the five-year age difference between Kristi and Kamila might not seem that much, on the surface, the maturity and emotional intelligence of a 15-year-old and 20-year-old truly feel decades apart.

If the tricks we demand of these athletes are too hard for an adult to do, we probably shouldn’t be having children doing them either – regardless of whether they can. Abuse seems to run rampant in these high-intensity, highly technical sports that also demand it’s athletes disguise the actual effort it takes to achieve their almost superhuman feats – like gymnastics and figure skating. And that’s likely because the most elite athletes are children.

I still love the Olympics for its lessons in human determination and endurance. But the idea that the Games represent the purity of anything after what we saw during women’s figure skating should be shattered for good. They’re only games if everyone is having fun. And that wasn’t fun. That was all wrong. Let’s try to fix it so we don’t litter the ice with more broken girls in the future. Happy weekend, all.

p.s. Oh, and ban Russia from everything - basically. If they cannot play fair (or, you know, refrain from starting unprovoked wars) they should not be there or host the events again.