February 16, 2022- Intellectuals love to savage children. It makes them feel oh, so clever-and relieves them of any accusation of being sentimental. Ignorant people love to address children by their surnames, as if they were adults. It makes them feel like they are readying the young ones for a hard world. The insecure, among the older generations love also the see no daylight between childhood and adulthood. It helps them to mask the pain of their own formative years. The greedy love to use children for their own ends-because nothing is more important than stroking their unbridled egos.
My prayers are with Kamila Valieva, that her native talent was disrupted, waylaid, and maybe destroyed, by the greedy among her own countrymen; that she is being held solely responsible for this, by some of her predecessors in the Olympic figure skating realm, whose jealousy is so ridiculously transparent-and justified, to the extent that it is possible to excuse their vitriol, only by the presence of dope in her system and that the cursory reading and viewing public will take the braying of the international sports media to heart-and vilify the girl, for the duplicity and treachery of her handlers. She could have done it all, without the drugs that society loves to hate, but no-once again, the elite show themselves as scorpions, eating their young.
May God bless and heal you, Kamila.
A Sagittarian Seeker 
I do feel sorry for Kamila Valieva — BUT — know it or not, she violated the rules of competitive skating (I have to believe that she knew the rules, though she may not have known that she had been given a banned substance). Others have struggled without any sort of enhancement, and won or lost according to their skills. I feel more empathy for those who had to compete against her, knowing that there could be a winner who was not qualified to compete –and for the subsequent silver and bronze winners who knew there might not be a ceremony/ With her transgression, one girl ruined the competition for all those competing against her. As an update, she did not win, and there was a ceremony; she learned a valuable lesson; she caused questions that will go far into the future about the qualifications of all figure skating competitors.
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The lesson that she learned was legitimate, and hopefully will bring personal growth. What I take issue with is the long-standing trend of adults piling on a child or teenager, knowing full-well that there is a huge difference between admonishing and guiding a young person, and gleefully savaging the youth form a safe distance.
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A sad circumstance. The Russian machinery is still cranking out athletes using the Soviet system and that includes using whatever means are available. They are competing as ROC because of the doping scandals… I hope Kamila can take charge of her training and train and compete “clean” in the future – she is after all still very young.
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I have the same hope for her, and the other young people who are at risk of being turned into automatons.
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