‘It’s all just so unfair,’ the coach of a U.S. skater says of the call to let Valieva skate.

Adam Rippon knows what it feels like to stand on the Olympic medals stand. A bronze medalist at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games, he has heard the cheers from the crowd when the biggest awards in figure skating are presented. And now that team figure skating medals ceremony at the Beijing Games have been postponed indefinitely because of a Russian doping case, he is furious.

“It’s all just so unfair,” said Rippon, who is coaching the U.S. figure skater Mariah Bell at the Games. “And now it’s also so unfair to all of these ladies because their whole Olympic experience is now wrapped up in the controversy because a country doesn’t want to play by the damn rules.”

In comments laced with rage and the occasional expletive at the Olympic skating arena on Monday, Rippon criticized the decision to let the Russian skater Kamila Valieva continue to compete at the Games despite testing positive for a banned drug; the International Olympic Committee’s announcement that it will not awards medals in any event where she finishes on the podium; and the continue presence of Russian athletes at major events years after the country was banned from global sports for running a state-directed doping scheme at the 2014 Winter Games.

Rippon said the athletes who will be denied their medals in Beijing will get over the disappointment, because celebrating their achievement on the ice after their performance will be what they remember the most. But the medals ceremony means so much more, he said, to so many more.

“That podium experience is for their families, it’s for their country, it’s for all of those people who helped get you to this point,” said Rippon, who coaches the U.S. figure skater Mariah Bell. “And now they’re being robbed of that experience by people who do not want to play fair continuously, over and over and over, and who shouldn’t be here.”

He said he was heartbroken that Valieva must endure scrutiny for doping when she is such a natural performer, and gushed over her “beautiful spins and exquisite extensions” and how fast she skates. He called it “a God-given natural gift that’s not something medicine can help; that’s not something a vitamin or a drug enhances.”

Still, Rippon called the ruling of a panel of arbitrators to allow Valieva, 15, to continue competing “absolutely the wrong decision,” even if it was done to protect the teenage star from “irreparable harm,” which was how the ruling worded it.

“What about the irreparable harm it does to the integrity of the Olympic Games?” Rippon said. “If they’re afraid of irreparable harm and don’t want to hurt her mentally, they should get her out of here right now and get her to a psychologist — or at least her mom?”