After the lighting of an almighty fire came the calm of the ice. The teenage Russian skater in the middle of it all, Kamila Valieva, was gliding and spinning on Friday afternoon in a way only she can.

There is no one quite like her at these Winter Olympics and no story quite like hers either. Blimey, nor will there be.

A trailblazer on Monday, a gold medal withheld on Tuesday, named on Wednesday, in the glare of cameras on Thursday and officially confirmed as having failed a drugs test on Friday. That quadruple jump of such wonder and history has spun into a sporting tornado for the ages.

It ripped through Beijing 2022 at 9.25am local time, when a bomb of a statement dropped from the International Testing Agency, giving clarity to what has hovered over the Games for days.

We can now say beyond doubt that this 15-year-old of such immense gifts, the star of the Games, had tested positive on Christmas Day for trimetazidine, a banned heart medication.

There are still questions and appeals to be resolved amid the establishment of guilt, innocence or exemptions, the more trivial of which concern how the results were not reported by a Stockholm laboratory until Tuesday, 45 days after the ping and one after she led Russia to team gold.

‘Very strange,’ said Stanislav Pozdnyakov, the president of the Russian Olympic Committee. No truer word.

We must also await certainty over whether Valieva will be cleared to contest the individual gold on Tuesday, for which she was considered as good as a shoo-in in those naive hours that followed Monday’s outing, when she became the first woman in the history of the Games to land a quad.

But those are really the fringe issues, for this is a child. Tough as a skating blade, because you do not survive in that world if you are not, but a child two months short of 16 nonetheless.

The Russians protest innocence, of course, and we will see how the Court of Arbitration for Sport rules on that. But if the running of due process goes against her, who on earth was involved? Was it a lone girl? Team personnel? An outsider? A state?

Who knows anything with the Russians any more, but depending on how this business plays out, then it could be an appalling welfare scandal as much as a doping one.

That is why it all felt so grim, as Valieva went through a practice routine in the training arena a few hundreds yards from the Capital Indoor Stadium, where she blew our minds on Monday.

To those smooth old rhythms of Bolero, she was doing it all again — the quads, the triples, the full graceful dance of an athlete dubbed ‘Miss Perfect’.

There were three falls and the occasional glimmer of frustration, but by returning to the ice in front of dozens of media, and in such frenzied circumstances, you had to wonder if a display of serenity is her best trick yet. She was watched through it all by Eteri Tutberidze, the Russian coach of some reputation whose uncompromising training methods have been the subject of discussion. Every few moments across half an hour, Valieva would return for her guidance and then her session was done.

At that point, she departed through the mixed zone for the media, where interviews take place. Alone, with no team handlers or coaches apparently seeing it necessary to accompany her, she had her hood pulled over her face.

A couple of reporters called her name and Sportsmail asked if she was a clean athlete or had taken drugs as she moved past. She did not stop and it was impossible to blame her for that.

It was deeply unpleasant to ask such a thing of a 15-year-old. But this has become the dominant subject of the competitive portion of a troubled Olympics.

Answers are needed from all manner of people in that Russian team and they can only be obtained with questions. Regrettably, that includes someone who might well be revealed as a victim when all this is settled. Olga Yermolina, a spokeswoman for the Russian Figure Skating Federation, later said Valieva’s training had suffered because she was ‘nervous’ and ‘in a bad mood’.

‘It is understandable,’ she added. ‘She is not in an information vacuum.’

Who knows how long this will run? Russia say they will ‘take comprehensive measures in order to protect the rights and interests of the members of the ROC team and to preserve the honestly-won Olympic gold medal’.

On the other side, the World Anti-Doping Agency, the IOC and the International Skating Union have appealed against the Russian Anti-Doping Agency, who initially suspended Valieva on February 8 but then agreed to lift the suspension a day later following a challenge from the skater.

An IOC spokesperson said: ‘What is clear is we want to expedite this as quickly as possible. It’s a legal issue and they can be complicated. Legal cases are difficult but it’s important that people get full justice.’

It is. In the meantime, that awful tornado will take some stopping.