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From the FasterSkier archive — posts syndicated from athletes’ and coaches’ own blogs between 2004 and 2012, kept online as published. Current coverage is at fasterskier.com.

Tag: Julia Tchepalova

  • Russian Coach, Barred from National Team, Still Working with Athletes

    Russian ski coach Anatoly Tchepalov. Photo, Ivan Isaev, Russian Ski Magazine.

    The Russian Ski Association (FLGR) has received high praise over the last two months for its work to combat performance-enhancing drug use. After being fined more than $180,000 this spring, the country escaped a second round of penalties at meetings of the International Ski Federation (FIS) in early November, thanks to its anti-doping efforts—which included changes in officials and coaches affiliated with scandals.

    “We know they are on the right track,” Gian Franco Kasper, the FIS president, told the Associated Press.

    But while nearly ten individuals have been barred from employment by the Russian national team, at least one coach, Anatoly Tchepalov, continues to work with athletes racing and training at an international level. Tchepalov was spotted in early November at events in Finland sanctioned by FIS, where one of his athletes, Sergei Shiriaev, skied to a victory over stars like Pietro Piller Cottrer, Tobias Angerer, and Kris Freeman.

    “He was there,” said Pepa Miloucheva, the coach of the Vermont-based Craftsbury Green Racing Project, in an e-mail. Miloucheva’s team was racing in Finland at the time.

    Tchepalov is the father and former coach of Olympic champion and convicted doper Julia Tchepalova, who was caught using the blood-boosting drug EPO at a race in 2009 and banned from the sport for two years.

    Tchepalov also coaches Shiriaev—who served a two-year ban for EPO use that ended in 2009—and Vassili Rotchev, an Olympic medalist who is married to Tchepalova.

    In a press release earlier this month, the FLGR stated that Tchepalov would not be engaged as a coach of Russia’s national team for the next four years, due to his involvement in past doping cases.

    But according to Andrey Kondrashov, a Russian Eurosport commentator, Tchepalov broke his contract with the national team two years ago—and there is nothing that the FLGR can do to keep Tchepalov from continuing to coach Shiriaev, Rotchev, and others.

    “The sports federations have no rights to disqualify coaches under the Russian Constitution and labor legislation,” Kondrashov wrote in an e-mail to FasterSkier. “That is why coaches are prohibited from working with the national team only.”

    Shiriaev and Rotchev were asked if they wanted to join the national team last spring, but in an interview with the Russian newspaper Kommersant in November, FLGR President Elena Vyalbe said that the two athletes made a decision to work with Tchepalov instead.

    The FLGR did not respond to a request for comment about Tchepalov’s status. But according to FIS Secretary General Sarah Lewis, skiers like Shiriaev and Rotchev are free to pick their own support staff.

    “According to the information received by the Russian Ski Association, Mr. Tchepalov has been removed from any coaching function within the Russian Ski Association,” Lewis wrote in an e-mail. “Athletes that are not part of the national team…can choose the coach(es) they want to train with.”

    The FLGR suspended eight other coaches aside from Tchepalov, but he is not the only one to remain in the sport. Former national team head coach Yuri Charkovsky is now the squad’s manager, while according to Vyalbe’s interview with Kommersant, another coach, Victor Smirnov, is working as a technician for the Kazakhstan team.

    Asked whether she foresaw any action to be taken against Tchepalov or other coaches in similar situations, Lewis said that issue was in the hands of the FLGR.

    “This is a matter for the Russian Ski Association to follow up as to whether the officials they have dismissed are breaching the terms of their dismissal,” she said.

    But according to Kondrashov, there is not much more that the FLGR can do. Tchepalov, he said, “works independently, without financial support from the state and federation.”

    “Tchepalov [is] not deprived of a job [as] coach, and therefore has the right under Russian law to appear in any field,” Kondrashov said.

    Kondrashov said that there are several other athletes on Tchepalov’s team, most notably 23-year-old Alexey Slepov, who took fourth at one of the races in Finland earlier this year.

    So far this winter, Tchepalov’s highest-profile skiers have competed solely in second-tier races—not on the World Cup, where thousands of dollars of prize money are at stake at each competition. But in the Kommersant interview, Vyalbe said that Shiriaev and Rotchev could make an appearance at World Championships in Oslo, if they qualified.

    Criteria for making the Russian team for that event would be released in December, Vyalbe said.

  • FIS to Consider Sanctions Against Russian Team

    Natalia Korosteleva (L) and Irina Khazova (R), both of Russia, after winning a bronze medal in the team sprint at the 2010 Olympic Games. Khazova returned last season from a two-year doping ban.

    After more than a half dozen doping cases among Russian skiers in the last two years, the International Ski Federation (FIS) will consider sanctions against the country at its upcoming meetings in Turkey next week.

    Under FIS rules, Russia’s athletes and coaches could be banned from participating in races, events scheduled in the country could be cancelled, or its officials could be stripped of voting rights at future meetings.

    In an e-mail to FasterSkier, FIS Secretary General Sarah Lewis confirmed that a “full report in regard to the situation with doping cases involving Russian athletes” is on the agenda in Turkey.

    Sanctions can be levied against a country if four or more of its athletes are caught doping within a 12-month period—which is the case for the Russian team. Natalia Matveeva, Eugeni Dementiev, Julia Tchepalova, and Nina Rysina all tested positive for the blood-boosting drug EPO in the winter of 2008-2009, although reports of the latter three cases did not emerge until last summer.

    FIS did hold Council meetings in the fall of 2009, after the news of all four positive tests had emerged, but did not address the issue. In the lead-up to the Olympics, the Russians began drawing more scrutiny, and when another doping case arose in January, FIS President Gian-Franco Kasper released a statement saying that the issue would be taken up in Turkey.

    Without pointing fingers at any particular nation, a number of athletes and coaches have alleged that some teams operate systematic doping programs, in which coaches or doctors administer all of their athletes with the same illegal products or techniques.

    In an interview with FasterSkier at the Olympic Games in February, Rasmus Damsgaard, who runs the drug-testing program for FIS, said that he had not seen evidence of doping programs within full teams.

    But Damsgaard did say that among some of the former Eastern Bloc countries, he had observed “clusters” of athletes with suspicious test results.

    “I’m not aware of the distribution of new and old coaches, doctors,” he said. “But there are groups of skiers that are consistently having fluctuations that are closing up on sanctions…identical fluctuations.”

    And on Tuesday, Damsgaard said that while FIS’s testing has tailed off after the Games, he stood by his remarks.

    “This is definitely still a concern to me,” he said.

    In an e-mail, Luke Bodensteiner, who will attend the Council meetings as a representative of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association, said he would not speculate whether FIS would go through with imposing sanctions on the Russians.

    In 2006, when the last significant doping scandal occurred, with the Austrian team at the Olympic Games, Bodensteiner said that “FIS was well coordinated with IOC [the International Olympic Committee] to determine and implement sanctions on a number of different levels.”

    That case saw Austria’s head coach, Emil Hoch, slapped with a lifetime ban from FIS competitions (though that was later reduced to 15 years), while the IOC levied a $1 million fine against the country’s national ski federation.

    But in this case, Bodensteiner said, Russia has already made some of its own changes, like bringing in new leadership for its Olympic Committee—which may make the Council less inclined to impose penalties. Alexander Zhukov, the new president, has said that old assumptions about doping should be eradicated “with scorching steel.”

    And while the country certainly has had no shortage of doping cases over the past two years, it did recently create its own independent agency, Rusada, to perform testing.

    “The new leadership has spoken clearly and publicly about the critical nature of anti-doping,” Bodensteiner said. “This is an important first step that was missing in 2006, and a cultural change that is certainly welcomed by many.”

    But Kris Freeman, a top American skier, said that he would not be satisfied unless officials from the Russian ski team were forced out.

    “I don’t blame the athletes so much as their staff,” he said. “The coaches and the whole administration seem to believe that doping is a part of the sport.”

    While the coaches need to go, Freeman added, Russian athletes should be prohibited from racing before a new system is in place.

    “Until they get those coaches out of there,” he said, “they have no right to be in a World Cup.”