Ellis Dean:“Performance enhancing” myass.
Garrett Lin:It’s a miracle he made it to the end of the program, let alone gave a gold medal–worthy performance.
Veronika Volkova:Rules are rules. Heath Rocha cheated.
Ellis Dean:No way did he take that shit on purpose. No fucking way.
Garrett Lin:Someone drugged him, and they got away with it.
Francesca Gaskell:And Kat refused to take a blood test herself—which makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
Kirk Lockwood:I’ve never seen the wheels of skating bureaucracy spin so fast.
Jane Currer:We had to proceed with a disciplinary hearing. It’s protocol.
Ellis Dean:They didn’t even wait until Heath got out of the damn hospital.
Garrett Lin:I wanted to be there to support them, but I couldn’t leave my sister.
Several weeks later, Katarina arrives at the International Olympic Committee’s headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, for the IOC Disciplinary Commission hearing. She’s dressed in a sharp black suit and does not spare the reporters gathered outside so much as a glance.
Garrett Lin:Kat didn’t leave Heath’s side either. Not until she was forced to.
Chapter 85
Heath and I requested a public hearing, delayed until he was well enough to attend.
The International Olympic Committee, in its infinite wisdom, denied our request. The fate of our careers would be decided behind closed doors in a glorified conference room, and I would have to speak for both of us.
“Remember what we talked about,” my lawyer said as we took our seats. The table was oval, probably intended to convey equality and transparency, but it looked like a noose to me.
The rules he’d sternly laid out in our meeting before the hearing were similar to the rules for skaters in competition: Stay respectful and polite. Never speak out of turn. And no matter what happens, don’t forget to smile.
The members of the disciplinary commission entered the conference room single file: first, the jowly, bespectacled president of the IOC, there to supervise the proceedings. He was followed by two other middle-aged men I didn’t recognize. And finally, there was Jane Currer, her shock of dyed red curls framing a stern expression I knew well from her years sitting at the judges’ table. She had always scored Heath and me harshly, and I couldn’t imagine she’d be feeling any more generous on this occasion.
“Thank you for joining us today, Ms. Shaw,” Jane said. “I hope Mr. Rocha’s condition continues to improve?”
As soon as he’d been deemed stable enough for transport, we’dmoved him from the Russian state hospital to a state-of-the-art private facility in Geneva. Even under their expert care, though, he remained weak and bed-bound, waking dozens of times per night to cough up more blood from his damaged lungs. Needless to say, I wasn’t getting much sleep either. After the first few nights, he started pleading with me to check into a hotel so I could get some rest. But there was no way in hell I was leaving him again.
“I appreciate your concern,” I told Jane—so respectful and polite my jaw ached with the effort. “Heath is on the mend. He sends his sincere regrets that he couldn’t be here.”
“Of course,” she said. “Shall we get started?”
A representative of the World Anti-Doping Agency was summoned to speak first. He displayed a bunch of slides and chemical equations to explain that the substance found in Heath’s bloodstream could not be definitively identified by any current laboratory tests.
“It appears to be a designer drug of unknown origin,” he said, “which taken in excess could certainly cause the cardiovascular damage Mr. Rocha has suffered.”
The fact that the drug was unidentifiable and therefore not specifically included on WADA’s Prohibited List didn’t get us off the hook. Far from it. Any drug not already approved for medical use, no matter its effects, was automatically considered banned in competition.
Then it was my lawyer’s turn. He laid out the case that Heath and I had been the victims of sabotage in Sochi—though he refrained from making any accusations aboutwhomight have vandalized our belongings and tricked Heath into ingesting a harmful substance without his knowledge or consent.
“As the records we’ve provided clearly show”—my lawyer paused so the commission members could shuffle through the folders in front of them—“Ms. Shaw and Mr. Rocha were tested in Boston before leaving for the Games, and tested again upon their arrival in Russia. Both of those tests were clean.”
There was no proof that I had taken anything, but my refusal of a post-competition drug test meant I was considered in violation of the doping rules too. I’d been so overwhelmed, between the camera flashes and the sirens and then the crush of doctors shouting in Russian, tryingto shove me out of the way. Away from Heath, unresponsive on the stretcher, his face so ashen I feared he was already gone. I refused to leave his side, refused to let anyone touch me. It wasn’t until later that I thought about how it would look.
Whatever Heath had taken, I’d taken too—though apparently my dose had been small enough that I suffered no noticeable ill effects. We had skated well in spite of those drugs, not because of them. But it didn’t make a damn bit of difference.
“Unfortunately,” Jane said, “regardless of how or why Mr. Rocha ingested the substance in question, the fact remains that it was found in his bloodstream during Olympic competition. So I’m afraid we have no choice but to—”
