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 (ROC) team were the favorites 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 seemed to be 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 of 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 which then took months, actually over a year, to clarify. In May 2023 it was announced that a hearing would 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 Beijing Winter Olympics but this application was dismissed by the court.

After multiple delays by the Russian Olympic Committee and the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA), the case reached the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in the fall of 2023. On 29 January 2024 the CAS announced the decision that Valieva was responsible for the substances in her doping test and was handed a four-year ban from competition, retroactive to 25 December 2021.

The next day, 30 January, the International Skating Union (ISU) revised the results from this competition, disqualifying Valieva in her events but allowing the points won by the other ROC skaters to count, while giving Valieva 0 points in her two phases of competition. This advanced the United States team to first place and the Japanese team to second place, moving the ROC team to third place. However, in an unusual move by the ISU, they did not re-allocate the points in the two phases in which Valieva competed, but left them as they were originally - thus, 1st place received 9 points, instead of the usual 10. Had they re-allocated the points, Canada would have moved ahead of the ROC team into the bronze medal position.

However, in late February 2024 the CAS announced that four appeals had been filed – one by the Canadian Olympic Committee protesting the results and asking to be moved up to the bronze medal position; and three from Russia, one from the Russian Olympic Committee, one from the Russian Figure Skating Federation, and one from the members of the Russian figure skating team at Beijing 2022, all asking that the original results be restored. On 4 March 2024, the Russian Olympic Committee appealed the February 2024 CAS decision on Valieva to the Swiss Federal Tribunal.

In the endless saga that had become this event, in early June 2024 three of the appeals were formally heard with CAS concerning the final decisions as to the standings in this event. The appeals were as follows: 1) Russian Olympic Committee vs. the International Skating Union; 2) Figure Skating Federation of Russia vs. the International Skating Union; 3) Aleksandr Gallyamov, Nikita Katsalapov, Mark Kondratyuk, Anastasiya Mishina, Viktoriya Sinitsina, and Kamila Valieva vs. the International Skating Union; and 4) Madeline Schizas, Piper Gilles, Paul Poirier, Kirsten Moore-Towers, Michael Marinaro, Eric Radford, Vanessa James, and Roman Sadovsky, Skate Canada, and the Canadian Olympic Committee vs. the Russian team members, the Russian Olympic Committee, the Figure Skating Federation of Russia, the International Skating Union, and the International Olympic Committee. (The Canadian appeals were scheduled to be heard in July 2024.)

On 25 July 2024, the CAS ruled against the three Russian appeals in the case, leaving Russia not able to use Valieva’s scores in the event. The Canadian appeal to be advanced to the bronze medal was denied in a decision by CAS on 2 August 2024, during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. The United States gold medal winning team received their medals on 7 August 2024 in Champions Park in Paris. Valiyeva’s team then appealed to the Swiss Federal Tribunal, but that appeal was dismissed on 4 October 2024.

And so the event seems to have come to a conclusion, a mere 32 months after it was contested at Beijing 2022.