Team, Mixed

Qualification rules for the team event were unchanged. Unfortunately for France this meant that, although they were seventh in the nations ranking table, their inability to qualify their skaters in a minimum of three of the four events ruled them out and let 17th ranked Ukraine take their place. Of the 10 teams involved, Ukraine and Germany were affected by positive cases of COVID-19 among their teams and had little chance of progressing to the final five.

The Russian Olympic Committee team were the favourites based on the performance of Russia in winning the World Team Trophy in April 2021 and they proved to be consistently competitive across all disciplines. Across all eight segments of the competition, the ROC only placed outside the top two on one occasion and, led by the brilliant 15-year-old Kamila Valiyeva, they were emphatic winners of the Olympic title, with the USA and Japan trailing in their wake in silver and bronze positions.

On the day the medals were decided, however, the IOC mysteriously announced that the medal ceremony would not immediately take place. The media reported that this was because a doping irregularity connected to the winning team. Eventually the International Testing Agency confirmed that Kamila Valiyeva had tested positive for trimetazidine at the Russian Championships in December.

The case was sent to the Russian Anti-Doping Agency for a provisional decision but, at time of writing, the official results could not be verified by the IOC. As of April 2022 the gold medal allocation remains in the air between the ROC and the USA and could very well take months or years to clarify (in May 2023 it was announced that a hearing will begin in August 2023). The US team petitioned the Court of Arbitration for Sport that the IOC should be ordered to present to them their silver medals before the end of the Games but this application was dismissed by the court.