BEIJING >> Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva’s performance this week was supposed to be a highlight of the Games.

As the sport’s breakout star here, she was expected to land quadruple jump after quadruple jump, just a week after the team event in which she became the first woman to land one at the Olympics. And Valieva, 15, would land those jumps with ease, like a bird floating onto a tree branch.

After it was made public last week that she tested positive for a banned drug, the question now is whether she can perform the way she always does, and that’s with near perfection, amid a doping scandal that nearly cost her the right to compete here. Arbitrators ruled Monday that she could skate but that no medals ceremony would take place if she finished in the top three because her doping case is under investigation. After Tuesday’s short program, she was in first place despite a stumble.

Valieva, trusty stuffed rabbit not far from her side, is ready to show off the quadruple jump that has helped lift the sport to another level. She is one of just 12 women who have landed the quad cleanly in competition, and she is expected to land several in Thursday’s free skate.

“Now you pretty much need a quad to medal at the Olympics,” said Mirai Nagasu, who in 2018 became the first American woman and third overall to land a triple axel at the Olympics. “To me that sounds crazy, but it’s true.”

In 2018, Nagasu’s triple axel was the coveted skill at the Olympics. Since then, the bar to succeed in the sport has soared into another stratosphere. The quadruple consists of four full revolutions in the air before the skater, less than a second later, lands on one foot. It’s a Russian specialty in the women’s free skate.

Valieva and her Russian teammates — Anna Shcherbakova, 17, and Alexandra Trusova, 17 — are capable of landing more than just one quad in their free skate, the only program in which women are allowed to perform quads. They land several of them.

They are so good at those quads that even the top male skater, Olympic gold medalist Nathan Chen, said he did not want to compete against them.

“They are so awesome that I think they’d beat all of us,” he said with a laugh.

Men have been landing quadruple jumps for years, beginning in 1988 when Kurt Browning of Canada first performed one. But on the women’s side, the advent of the jump, and its necessity for success, is relatively new and has shaken up the sport.

In 2002, Miki Ando of Japan became the first woman to land a quad in international competition. For years, no one else landed the jump in an international event. But since the 2018 Olympics, 12 women, including nine Russians, have done so.

What sparked this quad era in women’s skating — now called the Quad Revolution — was a monumental leap Trusova took one month after the 2018 Olympics, when she was 13.

At the junior world championships, Trusova, now known as the Quad Queen, landed two quads — a toe loop and a salchow. In the fall, she landed five quads in one free skate, serving notice to her competitors worldwide: The points race was on.

If other skaters wanted to catch her, they needed to up their games because quads, even landed poorly, can be worth more points than other jumps. A skater who performed a clean quad could score more than twice the number of points she would earn with a triple.

When Trusova skates, you can almost hear the sound of an adding machine calculating her points as they pile up, starting with the high base values for her quadruple jumps. From there, more points are added for how well she executed the jump, if it was done in combination with another jump and if it was landed in the second half of her program.

“Honestly, the Russians are so far ahead when it comes to base values, nobody will probably beat them,” said Adam Rippon, who coaches American Olympian Mariah Bell. “That’s just the hard truth of where skating is right now. But over time that will change. It always changes.”

The landscape of women’s figure skating changed when Russian teenagers began taking over the sport eight years ago.

Adelina Sotnikova was 17 when she won the Olympic gold medal at the 2014 Sochi Games. It was Russia’s first Olympic gold in that event and fourth Olympic medal in women’s skating, including when it won bronze in 1984, as the Soviet Union. Four years later, at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games, Alina Zagitova, at age 15, won the gold, and Evgenia Medvedeva, at 17, won the silver.

All three Russian women in singles skating in Beijing — Valieva, Trusova and Shcherbakova — are expected to win medals and sweep the event, just as the Russians did last year at the world championships. Even the fifth-place skater at Russia’s 2022 championships performed quad jumps — three of them.

And all three of Russia’s Olympic skaters are coached by Eteri Tutberidze at the Sambo-70 club in Moscow. Tutberidze coached Zagitova and Medvedeva, too, and gets the credit for coaching seven of the 12 women who have landed quads in international competition.

Before Valieva’s failed drug test was made public, Nikita Katsalapov, the Russian ice dancer and team captain, was asked if he knew Tutberidze’s secret to coaching the quad jump.

“You need to ask this to Eteri,” he said. “There is a secret, for sure, and I’m wondering what it is, too.”

The mystery is deeper now that the Valieva scandal has cast a shadow over the entire Russian skating program, particularly because Russia is already under penalty for implementing a state-run doping scheme at the Sochi Olympics. Whatever role performance-enhancing drugs turn out to have played at the Beijing Games, it’s clear that Russia has a different sports system than nearly every other country, including the United States.

Their Olympic sports on an elite level are government-funded, so athletes don’t have to pay for coaches or time on the ice or off-ice training — or anything.

Drew Meekins — who coaches Alysa Liu, the only American woman in Beijing to land a quad and one of only two American women to ever land one — said that Russians’ access to intensive training benefits those learning the hardest skills.

If an athlete needs nine hours of training in one day to perfect a quad, Meekins said, she can easily get that time. In the United States, top coaching costs about $100 an hour, so many athletes, even on the elite level, pay for only a fraction of an hour a day and practice on their own otherwise, he said.

There is another important factor behind the Russian dominance lately, said Jim Richards, a former biomechanics and movement science professor at the University of Delaware who studied jumping in figure skating. He said the Russian women have the perfect body type for quads.

“They’re skinny, and the skinnier they are, the faster they can spin,” he said. “Of course they have to be athletes, but being able to do a quad is partly about physical attributes. If they’re born that way, and that’s what their metabolism is, wonderful. But I’m not sure if it’s a healthy thing to push these skaters toward quads if they have to look this way.”

Based on Richards’ studies, skaters ideally must be in the air for a minimum of 63-hundredths to 64-hundredths of a second and achieve a jump height of about 20 inches to land a quad.

The height of a quad can be as much as 5% to 8% higher than a triple jump, said Deborah King, a biomechanist at New York’s Ithaca College who studies figure skating. She estimates that Trusova and Scherbakova are jumping about 3 to 4 inches higher in their quads than in their triples.

Skaters must get into their best rotating position before they reach the highest point of a quadruple jump, which is earlier than for a triple, King said.

If they cannot jump 20 inches, Richards said, skaters must spin faster to compensate. One obstacle is often in the way, though — and that’s the fear of injury.

“You have thousands of years of evolution that taught you, ‘OK, I really don’t want to spin any faster because I’m going to get hurt,’ ” he said.

Liu, 16, a two-time national champion, was the first American woman to land a quad, when she was 14. It was “really scary” to learn, she said.

“You have to be mentally tough and kind of reckless to do it,” she said.

It’s even scarier to do when you grow several inches, as Liu has in the past two years. Spinning got harder as her center of gravity shifted. She was also rebounding from a hip injury and in the process of relearning her triple jumps, so the quad quickly fell out of her grasp. She hasn’t attempted one since March 2020.

“I did have one and did do it for a little bit,” she said of the quadruple jump. “But now I don’t, and I’m OK with that.”

Even though Liu plans to perform a triple axel at the Olympics — a jump that four years ago was also an amazing and rare feat for women — the base value of the components in her programs will not make her competitive with the Russians under normal circumstances.

This was the Russians’ plan for more than a decade, said Tara Lipinski, an Olympic champion and figure skating analyst for NBC, explaining that they have gone out of their way to use the point system to their advantage and push the technical limits of the sport.

At the 2018 Olympics, the Russians relied on triple-triple jump combinations in the second half of their programs (for the 10% jump bonus given in the second half) to win the gold medal. For years, they have tailored the way they teach jumps to young skaters, Lipinski said, so they have the fundamentals to master a quad.

Those skaters implement a tweak here and a tweak there to their technique so that by the time they are ready to try a quad, all the components are in place for it: takeoff speed, height, tight body position as they rotate and quickness in rotating the body as soon as the feet leave the ice.

This must be done: The quad is now a part of women’s skating.

“We laugh about it,” Lipinski said, “because almost every month there’s a new skater that you hear of who has a quad. It’s what Olympic athletes are made of, and I think that’s extraordinary.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.