Dressed all in black with her dark hair pulled tightly into a bun, the Russian teenager many in the figure skating world have been wondering about finally showed up in Milan on Monday.
Just a day before she was to compete at the Winter Olympics, the young woman, 18-year-old Adeliia Petrosian, practiced for the first time at the official training rink. A swarm of camera lenses followed her as she glided across the ice. She landed jump after jump, easily turning her 5-foot body into a tiny rotating rocket.
Afterward, she scurried past reporters, stopping only long enough to say in Russian, “Mood is excellent!”
As the Olympic women’s figure skating competition begins on Tuesday, Petrosian is a contender for the gold medal — under the cloud of the biggest doping scandal in her sport’s history.
Yet she is relatively unknown outside Russia because the country’s athletes were barred from international competition in 2022 over its invasion of Ukraine. The Winter Games will be just her second senior-level event outside Russia since then.
“I can tell you that none of us have any idea how she will do, and she doesn’t have any idea, either,” said Adam Rippon, who won Olympic bronze for the United States in 2018 and coached at the 2022 Beijing Games. “But it’s kind of sad to think about that, if she does win a medal, how that will reflect on the sport.”
Petrosian has the résumé of a potential medalist: Three-time and reigning Russian women’s national champion. A history of landing quadruple jumps, the hardest in skating. A coach who churns out Olympic champions, including the last three women’s gold medalists, all Russian.
But that coach was also at the center of scandal four years ago, when one of her charges, the 15-year-old Russian skater Kamila Valieva, failed a drug test and threw the Beijing Olympics into chaos. Valieva, one of Petrosian’s training mates, tested positive for the heart medication trimetazidine, which is banned because it is thought to increase stamina and endurance. She claimed that her grandfather had accidentally contaminated her strawberry dessert with his medication.
Her failed drug test led to Russia being stripped of the team gold medal, and she served a four-year ban for doping. Even though Valieva was underage at the time, the rest of her team — including her coach, Eteri Tutberidze, and her choreographer, Daniil Gleikhengauz — were spared punishment.
There is no record of Petrosian testing positive and she has not been implicated in doping. But she and Valieva shared the same coaches, choreographer and training site in Moscow, where, according to findings by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, a medical team administered 56 different medications and dietary supplements to Valieva over two years, starting when she was 13.
Now Petrosian is carrying the hopes of her country, one that is eager to re-enter the Olympic fold and rebound from a series of sanctions that have been imposed on it since the revelation of a government-sponsored doping scheme at the 2014 Winter Games.
She will be the sole Russian skater in the women’s event, but she won’t officially be representing her country. She will compete as a “neutral athlete,” like 13 other Russians at the Games.
Though some international sports federations stood by their bans on Russian athletes for the Olympics in Italy, the International Skating Union, figure skating’s governing body, allowed two Russians to compete as neutrals: Petrosian and Petr Gumennik, who finished sixth in the men’s event last week.
Last September, Petrosian won an Olympic qualifying event in Beijing, her international debut as a senior-level skater. Her choreographer, Gleikhengauz, was barred from that event for failing to pass the I.S.U. screening for neutrality, which means that it found indications that he supported the invasion of Ukraine, according to a person with knowledge of the ban who was not authorized to speak on behalf of the federation. Tutberidze did not apply to be Petrosian’s coach at that event or at the Olympics, the person said.
An International Olympic Committee panel subsequently cleared Petrosian and Gleikhengauz to participate in the Milan-Cortina Games, where he is her official coach, according to the I.O.C. The organization did not immediately return a request for comment about why it cleared Gleikhengauz to coach in Milan after the I.S.U. had not cleared him for the qualifying event.
Madison Chock and Evan Bates, the U.S. ice dancing team that won silver in Milan last week, were not awarded their gold medal for the team event in 2022 until the Summer Games two years later because Valieva’s doping case dragged on so long. But Bates said he supported the inclusion of Russian athletes at these Olympics.
“In the spirit of the Games and fair play, I think there should be, in some regard, an avenue for those kinds of athletes,” he said.
Still, skepticism surrounds Petrosian’s participation.
Before she entered the Olympic drug-testing pool last May, the Russian antidoping agency was responsible for testing her for performance-enhancing drugs, the international skating federation said. But the World Anti-Doping Agency, the global body charged with ensuring fair competition in Olympic sports, does not recognize the Russian agency because it has failed to follow WADA rules.
Since last May, Petrosian has been drug tested by the International Testing Agency, which was formed after Russia’s state-sponsored cheating program was uncovered and is also responsible for testing athletes during the Games, the I.S.U. said. But some experts say questions around Petrosian and other Russian athletes remain because the effects of doping can last years.
“Russia remains non-compliant with WADA rules for its state-sponsored doping, but their athletes get waived through to the Games?” said Travis Tygart, chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency. “It’s exactly why athletes, fans and sponsors have lost confidence.”
Tutberidze, a dual citizen of Russia and Georgia, is officially the coach of a male Georgian skater in Milan. But she was at the practice rink on Monday when Petrosian skated, looking very much like her coach.
Witold Banka, the president of WADA, said that there was no legal basis to bar Tutberidze from coaching in Milan because an investigation into Valieva’s entourage found no proof of wrongdoing. But he added: “I don’t feel comfortable with her presence here.”
Tutberidze, who ignored several interview requests, has a reputation for pushing young skaters so hard that they burn out early and sustain injuries, and for berating Valieva on live television four years ago.
Entangled in the doping scandal, Valieva stumbled through her long program at the Beijing Games and finished in tears. Television cameras captured the moments afterward, when a grim-faced Tutberidze offered the teen scathing words. “Why did you stop fighting?” she said.
Thomas Bach, the I.O.C. president at the time, said he was “very, very disturbed” to see Valieva being treated with “such coldness.”
In interviews and on social media, Petrosian has had nothing but praise for her coaches. She and Gleikhengauz were featured in a recent Russian edition of Marie Claire magazine, in which they discussed fashion — Petrosian’s style trends toward that of Audrey Hepburn and of Zendaya — and the importance of trust between an athlete and coach. Petrosian said she had dreamed of training with Tutberidze and her staff before she joined them at about age 12, and that she “trusted them immediately.”
At the qualifying event, Petrosian won on the strength of her jumps, defeating past European champions from Georgia and Belgium. But figure skating experts, including Brian Boitano, the 1988 Olympic champion, said that she might lack the maturity gained from greater experience in international competitions.
Rippon, the former U.S. skater, who is also an analyst for NBC’s Olympics coverage, said the Olympics will be a much harder environment for Petrosian. Her lack of an international ranking put her in the first group to perform in the short program on Tuesday. She will be the second of 29 skaters to take the ice.
“I think of Adeliia as an athlete that will be under immense pressure here,” Rippon said. “I don’t know how she is going to place, or if she is going to get this really big boost from the judges. I really don’t know what the reception to her will be.”
Juliet Macur is a national reporter at The Times, based in Washington, D.C., who often writes about America through the lens of sports.
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