'Cold' coach back at Olympics after Valieva scandal

When figure skating coach Eteri Tutberidze's "tremendous coldness" was described as "chilling to see" at the last Winter Olympics, it may have been hard to imagine her returning to her sport's biggest stage.

Four years later, the highly successful coach is at Milan-Cortina - and not everyone is happy about it.

Tutberidze and her training methods were under the spotlight at Beijing 2022 amid the Kamila Valieva doping scandal that rocked the Games, and it was the then-IOC president Thomas Bach who gave the stinging assessment of the coach.

Rather than comforting 15-year-old gold medal favourite Valieva when she left the ice in tears after falling several times, Tutberidze had instead asked the youngster "why did you stop fighting?"

Bach said he had been "very, very disturbed" by what he had seen and that it did not give him "much confidence in this closest entourage of Kamila, neither with regard to what happened in the past, nor as far as it concerns the future".

Well, that future is here and so too is Tutberidze.

Not only is Tutberidze back at the Olympics, but she is apparently coach to another Russian teenage medal hope.

That skater is 18-year-old Adeliia Petrosian, who is here as a neutral athlete (AIN) as Russia's team are banned from the Games because of the country's invasion of Ukraine.

However, Tutberidze is not officially listed as the teenager's coach in the media guide for these Games and it remains to be seen whether she will be at rinkside when Petrosian competes.

Whoever she is with, there will be many eyes on Tutberidze, with the shadow of Valieva and Beijing 2022 set to loom large.

Tutberidze's official coaching role is with the Georgia figure skating team and she was at Milano Ice Skating Arena for the team event to watch one of her longest-serving pupils, Nika Egadze.

Egadze stormed to victory at the 2026 European Championships in Sheffield, where Tutberidze shared a warm hug with her skater after a gold medal-winning performance, and other athletes spoke positively about the coach.

It was a different story at Milano Ice Skating Arena as Egadze endured two error-strewn routines, with Georgia missing out on a medal.

In the short programme he made two early errors, failing to land the triple toe loop in his first technical element.

As he continued his performance, the TV cameras caught Tutberidze in passing - standing at rinkside, arms folded.

Egadze did enough to pull the performance around and help earn Georgia fifth place in qualifying, progressing to the final. When he came off the ice, the hug from Tutberidze seemed curt.

She joined the Georgian squad as they waited for the results. Generally, waiting teams will laugh and joke, even if they know elimination is coming.

Instead, the 11 skaters and team members sat stony-faced as the scores were announced.

If this was an indicator of the atmosphere in the team, it is certainly not positive, but it may have just been a moment of nervous focus.

Perhaps Tutberidze was minding her body language on Sunday as Egadze struggled even more in the free skate. Three of his first four elements scored negative points, and he nearly tripped over during his triple axel.

His coach gave him a pat on the hand as the numbers came in. Despite Egadze scoring only 154.79 for the free skate - 27 points lower than his season best - there was no berating.

The attention comes at a Games which began for Georgia with their team being roundly booed in San Siro when they entered the stadium during the opening ceremony.

Official views on Tutberidze's presence in Milan vary.

Given she has not been personally implicated in any doping scandals and has not broken any rules, Tutberidze has every right to be at the Olympics.

She has rejected any suggestions of wrongdoing in her career as a coach and said in 2022 she was baffled by Bach's remarks.

"There was an investigation at the time and no issues were found that could be actioned against that individual," IOC spokesman Mark Adams told a media conference on Sunday.

"If you are going to take action against someone, you need evidence, and from what I gather there isn't any."

However, World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) president Witold Banka said on Thursday he does not "feel comfortable with her presence here",, external while Britain's 1980 Olympic champion and BBC pundit Robin Cousins was unequivocal in his disdain.

"This comes down to the International Olympic Committee and International Skating Union - coaches are not part of the team," Cousins told BBC Sport.

"So when they ban a team, the coach of said team is not part of that. That is not correct, as far as I am concerned. I would not have her anywhere near Milan, personally.

"Is that because of behaviour, or Russia being banned? All of the above.

"The way we watched everything unfold, someone has to take the blame. Any skater would say the most important person is the coach; you trust them, you give yourself to them. That is not how you treat a student."

A few weeks ago, a television documentary - The Tutberidze Method - was released in Russia, celebrating her track record in training medal winners.

Two of Tutberidze's skaters have won women's gold and silver medals at the past two Olympics, but both were amid drama.

As the Valieva saga played out, Beijing 2022 champion Anna Shcherbakova was left barely celebrating victory – later saying she felt "emptiness" – while silver medallist Alexandra Trusova was so disappointed to miss out on gold that she said before the medal ceremony that she never wanted to skate again.

Four years before that, in 2018, favourite Evgenia Medvedeva was sobbing after being upstaged by 15-year-old training partner Alina Zagitova.

In the run-up to those two Games, Tutberidze's skaters had been hot favourites, dominating the World Championships and European Championships.

Little has been seen of Petrosian recently on the international stage because of Russia's ban from competition. The only real sighting of her was at September's qualifying event in Beijing, where she won gold, but not all the top skaters were there.

Petrosian has also won the past three national championships – making it 11 years in a row for Tutberidze skaters – and she is the first woman to land a quadruple loop in competition, but she was injured last year and has struggled with errors this season.

Following the Valieva episode, the minimum age for competitors was raised from 15 to 17, an age that has not been far off retirement age for some of Tutberidze's skaters in the past because of a combination of injury and a drop in technical skills.

It has been reported that her training model centres around female skaters peaking before they hit puberty., external

Italian Daniel Grassl, who went to work with Tutberidze in Moscow in 2023, described her as a "very good" coach, adding: "She can be a little bit cold but she was warm with us, and was supporting us."

Valieva, a mercurial talent who performances drew worldwide attention, was eventually banned for four years over her failed drugs test, but there were no sanctions for any of her entourage.

Her team have always insisted the failed test - for heart medication trimetazidine - was the result of contaminated cutlery which had been tainted by her grandfather's medication, while Wada called for those behind the failed test to face justice because "the doping of children is unforgivable".

"Wada is not behind the decision to accredit the coach [for Milan-Cortina]," Banka said. "The investigation found no evidence this person [Tutberidze] engaged in the topic, so there is no legal basis to exclude her."

Valieva, now 19, has only just returned to skating, finishing sixth in the semi-finals of the Russian Jump Championships last week. She is no longer coached by Tutberidze.

6-22 February

Milan-Cortina