Loena Hendrickx wins bronze medal thanks to suspension of Russian figure skater

Belgian figure skater Loena Hendrickx finished in fourth place at the 2022 European Championships, but has now been upgraded to bronze medal position following the suspension of Russia's Kamila Valieva by the International Skating Union (ISU).

The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) handed Valieva a four-year ban on Monday for testing positive for the banned substance trimetazidine on 25 December 2021, ahead of the Beijing Olympics. The 17-year-old will be suspended until the end of 2025.

Valieva's ban is retroactive, meaning that all her results since the date of the test will be annulled, the ISU announced on Tuesday. This includes her gold medal at the European Championships in 2022, which means that Hendrickx retroactively wins bronze.

It is the third European medal for Hendrickx: she won silver at the 2023 European Championships and became European Champion at the beginning of January in Kaunas, Lithuania. No Russians were allowed to take part in those competitions due to the country's invasion of Ukraine.

^{#FlandersNewsService | © PHOTO DANIEL MIHAILESCU / AFP}