BEIJING – Brian Boitano and Ashley Wagner have been spending a lot of time together during the Olympics at NBC Sports’ studios in Connecticut, co-hosting the Peacock show “Olympic Ice.”
They were made for that role. Figure skating has been their life: Boitano is the 1988 Olympic men's gold medalist, Wagner the 2014 Olympic team bronze medalist. Both won multiple national championships.
They have definitely seen the best of their sport. Thursday, they saw the worst of it.
“I’m still thinking about what happened,” Boitano texted just hours after the women's figure skating free skate, where Kamila Valieva – the Russian figure skating phenom at the center of an Olympic doping saga – had a disastrous performance and dropped all the way from first to fourth place.
“This can be a brutal sport at times but this took it to a whole other level," Boitano continued. "I don’t think I’ve seen anything as difficult to deal with, especially on the shoulders of a young girl. To have to deal with this kind of pressure, it’s probably the hardest situation I’ve ever seen, with an outcome that is going to change her life and even make it more terrible.”
Boitano said the scenes at the end of the competition were haunting.
“I can’t get over what happened when it ended. Of course Kamila Valieva, who’s just 15, sitting in Kiss and Cry, you just felt awful for her. And then the winner, Anna Shcherbakova, sitting all by herself, holding a stuffed animal, with such sad eyes. And then Alexandra Trusova, sad and angry and crying. I’m assuming that she was complaining that she should’ve won. It was so difficult, all of it.”
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Boitano and Wagner have been vocal advocates for clean sport and anti-doping measures, so they like many believed Valieva should not have been allowed to compete after a positive drug test. But that never meant they didn’t feel sympathy for Valieva.
“This is a moment where you genuinely have to say -- that poor kid,” Wagner wrote on Twitter. “She should not have ever been put in this position. She shouldn’t have been out on that ice, she shouldn’t have been put in a position where she became the face of a problem bigger than her.”
And the scene at the end that Boitano described?
“I can’t watch this,” Wagner wrote. “They all look devastated. This just shows that these children are put in a position that is so wildly unhealthy and harmful to them. I’m sick to my stomach.”
Follow columnist Christine Brennan on Twitter @cbrennansports.
