Olympic speed-skating bronze medalist Ekaterina Abramova has been banned from next season's world championships. What’s more it seems the whole team could miss out because of her amazing spat with team-mate Ekaterina Lobysheva – which may have

At Turin 2006, Russian speed skaters won their second medal at the Olympics, beating Japan in the women’s team pursuit and taking bronze.

The following year the same trio was looking for another medal at the World Championship in Salt Lake City. However, the team, hit by injuries, finished fourth and had to wait until 2008. No one expected Russia would miss next year’s competition simply because of a huge scandal inside the team.

“I have only one comment – it’s our defeat – and Russia’s defeat. We’ve all lost,” said Ekaterina Lobysheva.

Speed skating is not normally thought of in terms of violence. But that’s exactly what happened between Ekaterina Lobysheva and Ekaterina Abramova. They've shared a podium – and only when together have they achieved results and won medals.

That’s why Abramova’s refusal to compete at the World Cup in Holland in February was a huge blow to Lobysheva and she accused her team-mate of being unfair and allegedly even punched her.

As a result Russia also missed the highly-anticipated World Championships in Japan at the beginning of March. Abramova received a one-year ban from the Russian Union of Speed Skaters, which will keep her sidelined from all major tournaments in the next 12 months.

“Even before the hearing I knew they were going to ban me, because the federation only wanted to find one person responsible for the whole conflict. But I am sure this is, the problem of our coaches who’d been aware of the personal clashes with Ekaterina, but did nothing to prevent the scandal,” Abramova said.

As for the coaches, they seem to be more bothered with the future of Russian speed skating than its current problems.

Vadim Sayutin, who’s been working with the women’s team for the past two years, says its main trouble is that it lacks world-class athletes to choose from.

“There’s not enough rivalry between Russian speed skaters. If we had more choice, we could avoid such brawls. As for the ban, I think Abramova deserves it because it’s mostly her fault. Lobysheva will continue to compete. She only received a warning,” he said.

Despite Sayutin’s optimism, Lobysheva is unlikely to win anything else, since without Abramova she’s likely to struggle. She’s never had any individual success at major events. But Russia’s Head Coach Nikolay Gudin is not concerned.

“We’re more focused now on forming a new and bigger speed skating team now – men’s and women’s – that will represent the country at the Sochi Olympics,” he said.

Various sports have been marred by doping and match-fixing recently, some athletes have been stripped of medals but this scandal is a strange one, Russia is losing its medals even before the competition starts.