Doping and Skating

When you think of doping, you think of baseball, football, and Lance Armstrong. Maybe swimming or track and field comes to mind too.

Do you think of figure skating? I don't. It isn't a sport usually rocked by doping scandals. (Can you imagine little girls doping? I don't want to.)

I thought about this today after I saw an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune about how Olympic Bronze medalist Carolina Kostner is appearing before an Italian panel to address the allegation that she was complicit in helping her boyfriend dope up in London 2012. He's an Olympic champion race-walker (gold in Beijing 2008), and he was suspended from the London Games after he tested positive. Whether she really helped him or not, I have no clue. That would be kind of sucky if she did. (I'll always still love her skating though.)

Regardless of what the panel finds, I was curious, so I looked up some documented cases of doping in competitive figure skating. The only two I was able to verify in the short time I spent Googling was that of Russian pairs skaters Elena Berezhnaya in 2000 and Yuri Larionov in 2007.

Olympic champion Berezhnaya had her European Championship gold stripped that year (w/ partner Anton Sikharulidze) after she tested positive for pseudoephedrine she had taken in cold medicine. Larionov was banned from the sport for two years after he tested positive for Furosimide that he claimed he took for headaches caused by high blood pressure. Both drugs were on the ISU's list of banned substances at the respective times.

I'm no doctor, nor do I claim to know much about the drugs banned by the ISU, but I tend to think that drugs generally have a negative effect on skating. The last thing a skater needs before competition is to have a foggy head, feel dizzy or waffle too much in weight in a short period of time.