During the 2022 Beijing Winter Games, the American figure skaters missed out on winning any medals.
The U.S. figure skaters had initially secured second place in the team event, but this was overshadowed by the doping case involving Russian skater Kamila Valieva.
After nearly two years of legal proceedings, the Court of Arbitration for Sport finally ruled against the Russian appeals to reclaim the gold medal.
Following Valieva’s disqualification and subsequent four-year ban, the U.S. figure skating team was officially declared as the gold medalists.
This pivotal ruling now allows the team to receive their medals at the upcoming Paris Summer Games, reported The Guardian.
Here is more from The Guardian:
The US figure skating team was formally confirmed as gold medalists from the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics by a sports court ruling on Thursday, opening the way for the team to receive medals at the Paris Summer Games.
“We are thrilled to finally honor these incredible athletes,” Sarah Hirshland, chief executive of the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, said in a statement. “We are especially excited that the beautiful city of Paris will join us in this celebration.”
It is now more than two years since the American skaters left the Beijing Winter Games without a medal of any color. They had placed second in the team event to the Russians including teenage star Kamila Valieva, who within hours was implicated in a doping case that took almost two years to judge.
Now, Evan Bates, Karen Chen, Nathan Chen, Madison Chock, Zachary Donohue, Brandon Frazier, Madison Hubbell, Alexa Knierim and Vincent Zhou should be coming to Paris as official Olympic champions.
On Thursday, the court of arbitration for sport (CAS) said three judges dismissed Russian appeals to be reinstated as gold medalists. The Olympic title was lost in January when Valieva was disqualified and banned for four years.
It took the latest CAS ruling in the Valieva saga to guarantee the US athletes their overdue gold medals, and for Japan to be in line for upgraded silvers.
Special medal ceremonies are planned by the International Olympic Committee in the second week of the Paris Olympics to honor athletes whose results have been upgraded because of doping cases that were prosecuted and resolved in recent years.
Those celebrations will be in the Champions Park plaza looking across to the Eiffel Tower on the opposite bank of the Seine River.“This [CAS] decision comes just in time to still be able to make the medal allocation for gold and silver possible,” the IOC said in a statement.