MILAN — Tradition holds that when you win an Olympic medal, you get that medal draped over your neck fairly quickly — usually a few minutes later, maybe a half-hour at most. Most Olympians don’t have to wait two-and-a-half years, or circle half the globe, to finally receive their medals.
But then again, most Olympians aren’t medal-winning figure skaters competing against the Russians. You combine the inherent drama of figure skating with the corner-cutting, line-blurring and outright cheating of Russian delegations, and you get what happened with Madison Chock, Evan Bates and the rest of the 2022 Olympic figure skating team: a Winter Olympics medal ceremony in the height of the summer.
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Chock and Bates, who began their quest for individual gold on Monday, are the only repeat Olympians from a remarkable moment in Team USA figure skating history: a medal celebration at the height of the 2024 Paris Olympics to present medals to winners of the 2022 Beijing Olympics.
The story revolves, as so much else has over the past few Olympic Games, around Russian doping. Chock, Bates and the rest of the 2022 American team won silver at the Beijing Games, placing second behind Russians skating under the acronym ROC (“Russian Olympic Committee”) due to past doping violations.
However, tests determined that Russian team member Kamila Valieva had taken a banned substance prior to the 2022 Games. With Valieva’s status — and, thus, that of the entire Russian team — in doubt, the IOC held off on awarding any of the medals, to the Russian athletes or to the silver medalists of the United States and the bronze medalists of Japan.
The U.S. team left Beijing without a medal of any color, and for nearly two long years, their trophy cabinets remained empty. Finally, in 2024, the International Skating Union rendered its decision: Valieva’s numbers would be stricken from Russia’s total, moving the United States into the gold-medal position and Japan into silver. (Russia, not Canada, received the bronze on a technicality, which was a north-of-the-border scandal all its own.)
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The United States had won gold after all. But the gold medals were now locked in a vault in Lausanne, Switzerland, where all unclaimed and unallocated medals reside. How would America’s skaters get their rightful medals with the appropriate level of ceremony and respect?
The solution was elegant, if not simple: The IOC awarded the medals at a special ceremony during the Paris Summer Olympics in 2024. “We got on the airplane knowing we were already going to get a gold medal, which was great,” Bates said recently. “We didn’t have to perform or compete.”
“No stress!” Chock joked.
In a sharp contrast to the austere, zero-audience, COVID-era Beijing Olympics, the Paris Games were a celebration of all things Olympics and open to all. The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee used that fundamental difference to ensure that the figure skating team got something they didn’t in 2022: a full-on family celebration.
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“The USOPC really did a phenomenal job treating all the athletes really well,” Bates said. “They brought out friends, family, coaches. Everybody was ecstatic.”
Under a brilliant blue Paris sky, the team walked into Champions Park, hands held high, smiles on every face as the national anthem played. The ceremony came just a few weeks after Chock and Bates were married. It’s safe to say they had a very good summer.
“It was hard to describe how wonderful it was,” Bates said. “It really was magical.”
“It was also a reunion with our teammates, most of which we hadn’t seen in two years since Beijing,” Chock added. “So it was really fun to be reunited with them and share that Olympic spirit again.”
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The photos from the ceremony radiate joy, as the American and Japanese teams stand before the Eiffel Tower with their medals won in Beijing. The Russian skaters did not show up to receive their bronze medals.
“After a two-and-a-half-year wait, it was as good as it could have possibly been,” Bates said. “And it was just a wonderful way to close off that chapter.”
Now, the duo are on to their next chapter in Milan. They’ve already won another team gold to accompany their Beijing medal — and this one didn’t require any waiting.
For all their team hardware, though, Chock and Bates have not yet won an individual medal. This is their fourth consecutive Olympics together — Bates also competed in Vancouver as part of another pair — but to date, they haven’t ascended the podium as individuals.
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That streak could well end later this week. They finished the free skate portion of the ice dance event in second place, their score of 89.72 just behind the French team of Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron’s 90.18.
“We felt really strong, we felt like it was even better than a team event,” Chock said afterward. “It’s the feeling of accomplishment when you did your best on ice, and the rest isn’t necessarily all up to us, so we’re really proud of how we skated and proud of how we controlled what we could.”
Chock and Bates will return to the ice on Wednesday with hopes of adding a third gold medal to their collection … and hopes that it won’t take very long to hold it in their hands.
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