Kamila Valieva is a victim – but her four-year ban must stand

Occasionally a story comes along so horrible and corrupted that you wonder how it ended up on the sports pages. The wretched tale of Kamila Valieva, a teenage Russian ice skater given 56 different medications between the ages of 13 and 15 and caught for doping, was so dark that it could make you despair.

Yes, many of the treatments revealed this week were basic medications such as aspirin, vitamins and ointments. But there was also an unexplained steroid hormone as well as two forms of heart medication, all given to a child.

All ingested by a teenage girl who, in the midst of the scandal that first enveloped her at the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022, stumbled and tripped in front of a watching