Skeleton bronze medalist Elena Nikitina‘s name appears on an athlete list that guided Russian doping violations at the Sochi Olympics, though Nikitina denied doping by any Russian skeleton sliders in a Facebook message to U.S. fourth-place finisher Katie Uhlaender, according to The New York Times.
“I am not on the list!” Nikitina told Uhlaender, according to the newspaper. “I hope that the truth will prevail! And the perpetrators of this scandal will be punished!”
In Sochi, Uhlaender finished .04 behind Nikitina after four runs, just missing her first medal in her third Olympics.
“I’ll never know what it feels like to stand on the podium in Sochi, but I want to put this behind me,” Uhlaender said, according to the newspaper. “I want to know: Am I a bronze medalist?”
Uhlaender, 31, sat out the 2014-15 season with hip and ankle surgeries, tried her hand at track cycling and returned to skeleton last season, finishing 10th at the world championships.
Nikitina has continued to compete since the Sochi Olympics, earning bronze at last season’s world championships.
Fifteen Sochi medalists, including men’s skeleton champion Alexander Tretiakov, were on a Russian doping list first reported by CBS News in May and expanded by The New York Times.
The reports cited Grigory Rodchenkov, former director of a Moscow drug-testing lab that was stripped of its accreditation by the World Anti-Doping Agency in April.