An ice charade

 There are always tears in figure skating. It's why they call the area where skaters sit to wait for their scores the "Kiss & Cry" room.

Yesterday was different. 

Yesterday was the final act in the women's singles figure-skating competition, which is frequently rendered comical by its squirrely judges but this time was a horror show wrapped in a farce swaddled in a charade.

A Russian skater won gold, and another Russian skater won silver. But no one will remember Beijing for that. 

What they'll remember it for is yet another Russian skater breaking down in sobs, because she's 15 years old and that's what 15-year-olds do when they're betrayed by all the alleged grownups around them. 

That happened to Kamila Valieva yesterday. A child prodigy, the most scintillating performer in her sport, she stumbled through a wreck of a long program, falling from first to fourth in the final standings. Then she dissolved in tears as her "coach" berated her, a wrenching emotional collapse that will likely be the signature moment of these Games.

What made it wrenching was Valieva's failure was not really her failure. She's 15 -- and, thanks to the venality and incompetence of the adults around her, she bore a weight in these Games no one with years more experience could have borne.

Failure?

The failure belongs not to Valieva but to her jackass of a coach, and to her federation, and to her nation. And last but hardly least, to the Olympic movement itself.

Every last of them failed Kamila Valieva. Every last one of them ought to be strung up by the thumbs for doing so. 

Her coach, for being an unfeeling shite-head.

Her federation and her nation, for allowing a culture of doping that pressures young athletes to go along or get along outta here.

The Olympic movement, which rewarded that culture by allowing Russian athletes to compete in the first place, then dropped it all on the narrow shoulders of  one tiny high school-age kid, allowing her to be held up as the poster child for drug cheats.

Shame on all of 'em. And to hell with all of 'em.

The Olympic motto -- citius, altius, fortius -- has been abused before by its alleged proponents, in small ways and big. Rarely has it done so in a manner that provokes so much disgust. 

Citius, altius, fortius, scapegoate-ius. That ought to be the new motto.

As the Blob noted yesterday, it's always the athletes who save the Olympic Games from themselves. But then you watched as a weight not hers to bear crushed Valieva, and how utterly alone the adults left her with it, and you wondered if even the athletes could save these Games.

I vote no.