The article studies the nature of presenting the sports incident with the russian champion K. Valiyeva at the
Beijing Olympics-2022 in the media discourse of the russian pro-government and patriotic media. Media coverage of
the 2022 Olympics focused on a detailed day-by-day description of the doping scandal that took place in women's
figure skating with an obvious favorite in this sport. The aim of the study is to analyze the metaphors with military
semantics used in the media when describing the incident that took place. Based on the well-established opinion that in
modern society sport is considered to be a surrogate for war, the article confirms the hypothesis that the metaphors
chosen by the editors to represent a purely sporting incident guide the audience to see what is happening in sports as an
element of the collective West's global war against Russia. The material for the research is represented by texts collected
in the Semanticforce.net system using the keyword «Kamila Valieva» in the media text, headline or subheading. The
selected texts contain metaphors of war.
The authors conclude that today, big-time sports and major sporting events act as a semantic field for political mobilization and fighting cognitive wars in whose media discourse the point of view of one party is based on value categories, explicated in presenting the affairs and their evaluative potential in the binary opposition of «friend – foe». In this
article, the authors show that the russian official and pro-government media used communication strategies of patriotic
audience mobilization based on the use of military metaphors in response to the incident with Kamila Valieva's doping
test at the 2022 Olympics. The strategy used by the collective West in this situation in russian media discourse is
marked as a declaration of war against russian sports and the country as a whole.