BEIJING—The teenager who clinched a gold medal for the Russian Olympic Committee’s figure skating team, only to be ensnared days later by doping allegations, is better known in her sport for another distinction: She’s an Eteri girl. 

The drama of another doping scandal that once again pits Russia against international sports organizations has cast a harsh spotlight on Eteri Tutberidze, the head of Kamila Valieva’s coaching team and one of skating’s most polarizing figures. 

She...

BEIJING—The teenager who clinched a gold medal for the Russian Olympic Committee’s figure skating team, only to be ensnared days later by doping allegations, is better known in her sport for another distinction: She’s an Eteri girl. 

The drama of another doping scandal that once again pits Russia against international sports organizations has cast a harsh spotlight on Eteri Tutberidze, the head of Kamila Valieva’s coaching team and one of skating’s most polarizing figures. 

She is now part of an Olympics drama that has cast a pall over the Winter Games and threatens at least one Russian gold medal.

Tutberidze’s young students have revolutionized the sport in recent years with an arsenal of spectacularly athletic jumps that put them leaps and bounds above the rest of the world. But their phenomenal success and short careers have underscored the cutthroat nature of Russian women’s skating and the steady clip of a conveyor belt that has produced champion after champion, making them seem almost interchangeable. 

Russian training strategies have also raised concerns about the welfare of underage athletes in the most-adored event of the Olympics. The issue will linger even after Valieva’s legal situation is resolved. Tutberidze is the coach of the two other ROC female skaters in the women’s event, 17-year-olds Anna Shcherbakova and Alexandra Trusova, and they could easily take gold and silver in her absence.

Kamila Valieva and her coach Eteri Tutberidze attend a training session on Feb. 11.

Photo: anne-christine poujoulat/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The Russian Anti-Doping Agency said Friday that it was launching an investigation of Valieva’s team “to identify all the circumstances of the possible anti-doping rules violation.” The agency didn’t name Tutberidze and there has been no suggestion of wrongdoing on her part. The IOC said it would welcome an investigation into the entourage of an athlete.

Olga Ermolina, a spokeswoman for the Figure Skating Federation of Russia, characterized Tutberidze as a talented coach and dismissed criticism of her methods, saying that if the complaints were accurate, “then Tutberidze wouldn’t have a line of people who want to train with her.” 

“Any leader, even yours, must be tough at times, because people by nature don’t always want to work and give 100% every day,” Ermolina said. “And her fanatical dedication is paying off.” 

Instantly recognizable for her steely rinkside demeanor and striking curly blond hair, Tutberidze is known in Russia as the “Snow Queen” and has provoked extreme reactions for years. 

To some, she’s a genius. To others, she’s a tyrant. They say the woman named the best coach in figure skating by the International Skating Union in 2020 has transformed the sport—or destroyed it. 

Until this week, those reactions were often split down old East-West lines, with Tutberidze equally comfortable embracing the adulation of Russia and being seen as the cartoonish villain in the United States. 

But her status at home, where she already had some detractors, appeared to slip with the ROC team medal and Valieva’s eligibility for the singles competition at stake. The Twitter hashtag #позорТутберидзе, or #shameonTutberidze began trending in Russia on Friday, after international sports officials confirmed that Valieva tested positive for a banned substance weeks before the Olympics. 

The Court of Arbitration for Sport is due to decide by Monday on whether Valieva would be allowed to compete in the women’s figure skating singles event in Beijing.

After practice on Saturday—where Valieva, her fate still in limbo, gave Tutberidze a long hug—the coach said she is sure her skater is innocent.

“For us this is not a theorem but an axiom—there is no need to prove it,” Tutberidze told Russian television. “Either this is a fatal coincidence, or a well prearranged plan. We really hope that justice will prevail.”

“We are with our athletes in trouble and in joy, to the end,” she added.

Kamila Valiyeva talks to her coach Eteri Tutberidze during the 2022 ISU European Figure Skating Championships.

Photo: Sergei Bobylev/Zuma Press

Ermolina said that Tutberidze and other federation officials weren’t available for further comment during the Olympics.

Tutberidze has made her coaching philosophy clear: Like the Russian skating federation, she believes the price of training is worth the glory of victory. 

“I feel infinitely offended if I understand that an athlete could have done this training much better,” Tutberidze said in a December interview with Russian state television. “If I don’t force them, this athlete will not have a medal and the joy of standing on the podium and hearing the anthem in their honor.” 

Other skating coaches have been accused of abusive methods, including in the U.S. and Japan, but they’re typically less brash about their approach. They also haven’t had the same success: over the last eight years, Tutberidze’s students have dominated the senior and junior levels, snagging two Olympic gold medals and a silver before Beijing.

“Tutberidze keeps her little girls under tremendous pressure,” coach Alexander Volkov told Russian state newswire RIA Novosti in 2019. “They do whatever she says. If she tells them to do a quintuple jump, they will go. They will break, but they will go. She squeezes out of them everything she can squeeze out.” 

The crowded roster of talented female Russian skaters chasing a handful of opportunities has raised the bar for the rest of the world and knocked other nations out of medal contention. It has also created an unprecedented turnover of champions and left some of Russia’s most successful skaters with significant physical and mental injuries. 

And it has made the Russians the sport’s most dominant force. In the last three skating seasons, 11 different Russian women have won around 80% of the medals across the major international competitions. At four of the events, they were the only skaters on the podium. 

The Russian federation essentially thrives on what Romanian-American gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi used to call “scorpions in a bottle,” a vivid depiction of survival of the fittest in which only one creature emerges alive. 

When picking a team for a major international competition, they can usually choose from some 10 age-eligible skaters who could medal. And had Valieva’s result emerged sooner, she would have been easily replaceable: ROC’s first alternate happens to be the reigning world silver medalist. 

As in gymnastics, figure skating has come to elevate prepubescent athletes racing to acquire skills while their bodies are at their freshest and lightest, hoping to beat the clock of injury or exhaustion just in time for a once-every-four-years shot at Olympic glory. 

That also ensures rapid turnover at the top. Russia has cycled through a half-dozen leading women in the four years since two of Tutberidze’s prized students, then-18-year-old Evgenia Medvedeva and 15-year-old Alina Zagitova, battled on the Pyeongchang ice with the rest of the field competing for bronze. 

Eteri Tutberidze with Alina Zagitova, left, and Evgenia Medvedeva during the 2018 Winter Games.

Photo: Sharifulin Valery/Zuma Press

Zagitova, who won gold, hasn’t competed since December 2019. Medvedeva, who took silver, last skated in competition in September 2020. 

Neither could keep up with the latest wave of Tutberidze’s pupils as they let loose their new collection of triple axels and quadruple jumps.

“This is sport. Today we have five girls,” Evgeni Plushenko, the four-time Olympic medalist who coaches many of the Russian contenders outside Tutberidze’s purview, said before the last Olympics. “Maybe one month later, we have one girl.” 

That one girl is now Kamila Valieva. 

From the time she was 3 years old, Valieva dreamed of being the Olympic champion, she has said. She dabbled in ballet and gymnastics, but when her mother decided it was time to specialize, Valieva chose figure skating. She left her hometown of Kazan for Moscow to train. 

By the time she arrived in Beijing and became the first woman to land a quadruple jump at the Olympics, Valieva was a star back home, where she has been featured in the Russian edition of Vogue magazine. When Valieva skated in the team event last week, actor Alec Baldwin praised her on social media hours before her positive test was reported. 

“A song. A poem. A painting. To have dedicated one’s life…to this artistry,” Baldwin wrote on Instagram. “Thank you, Kamila Valieva, for your gift of heart-stopping beauty to the world.”

He wasn’t her only spellbound fan. In her first season working with Tutberidze, Valieva perfected a short program based on the Pablo Picasso oil painting “Girl on a Ball,” which depicts a group of traveling circus performers during a rehearsal. Picasso’s granddaughter invited her to visit the artist’s museum in Paris after watching her performance. 

But the question about the Russian formula that delivered Valieva is the cost. 

Zagitova, the Pyeongchang gold medalist, has said that she restricted her own food intake and wouldn’t even let herself drink water at those Games.

“We just rinsed our mouths and spit it out,” she said in 2019. 

Medvedeva has said she retired because she could no longer turn her back in the direction she needed to jump. Shcherbakova skated through pneumonia at the Russian championships in late 2020. Trusova sustained a stress fracture in October, competed anyway, then found herself sidelined for weeks as she tried to claw her way back to the Olympic team. 

She was aided when one of Tutberidze’s other students sustained a broken arm in training and yet another of her skaters appeared to be felled by a fractured hip; it was later described as an upper leg injury.

Tutberidze primarily works with young female skaters. One exception is Vladimir Samoilov, who began experiencing back problems and skated with enormous pain, he told Russian sports site Sport24.ru in December. Tutberidze didn’t like that. 

“She said: ‘Either you are training, or if your back hurts, stay at home and don’t come again,’” Samoilov said. He came to train—and injured himself.

Tutberidze’s supporters say she takes great care of everyone under her tutelage, occasionally supports her athletes financially and makes herself available to help them on and off the ice. 

“It is as if she lives with you through all the experiences and worries,” Adeliia Petrosian, one of her 14-year-old students, told sports channel Matchtv.ru in January. “Her sense of humor is gorgeous. She has very funny jokes and is absolutely not offensive. Even the parents laugh.“

Eteri Tutberidze chats with Kamila Valieva during a training session at the Capital Indoor Stadium in Beijing.

Photo: Valery Sharifulin/Zuma Press

Petrosian, who is on the verge of eligibility for senior competition, is currently doing quadruple jumps that are even more difficult than Valieva’s. She credits Tutberidze’s psychological approach for her success. 

“She takes your hands and on ‘three’ we exhale together,” Petrosian said. “As if at first you inhale all your worries, and then sharply blow them out of yourself. And with a cold head you go out to skate.”

Tutberidze has said that she believes in transparency. Others can flatter her skaters, she says. She prefers the truth. 

“The truth, as it is, they will hear only from me,” Tutberidze said in December. “If our athletes are good, they will be welcome everywhere. If they are bad, then no one needs them.” 

—Ben Cohen contributed to this article.

Write to Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com and Georgi Kantchev at georgi.kantchev@wsj.com