Within two days, 11 former athletes had come forward with nearly identical accounts. Martin Voss had not just buried one case. He had managed an entire pipeline of quiet erasure. For Frank, that was the moment the floor fell away. He had spent two decades believing he was uniquely unlucky, that his case was an accident of bad evidence. Now he understood his destruction had been policy.

And the man 40 feet away had not been a rogue clerk. He had been a specialist. Voss responded through a lawyer. He denied everything and called the evidence fabricated. No one believed him. The Federation issued a carefully worded statement saying it was reviewing historical records and cooperating with independent inquiries. It said nothing about restoring medals.

Frank read the statement three times. The word reviewing made his jaw tighten. He knew what review meant in that world. It meant waiting for the public to lose interest. He told Dana he was done waiting. The rink board, meanwhile, faced its own pressure. Several members wanted to fire Voss immediately, but their lawyer warned against a wrongful termination suit if the external reviews stalled, so they waited, too.

Frank was not suspended because he had done nothing wrong, but he was told to stay home with pay until the media left. He spent those days in his small apartment reading the old legal files Dana kept sending him. For the first time, he spoke to his ex-wife on the phone. She cried. She said she had always believed him. He didn’t cry. He just sat with the silence.

On Thursday, the thing that should have ended the fight actually raised the stakes higher. A federal representative from Ohio, a Democrat named Hollerin, announced a congressional inquiry into the federation’s appeal processes from 2004 to 2010. The inquiry would have subpoena power. Voss could no longer hide behind a board. He could be compelled to testify. That was the wait. It gets worse moment for Voss.

But for Frank, the worst was still coming. The same day, Dana’s phone rang. The caller used a blocked number. He said he was a former Federation records keeper. He told Dana there was a sealed file in a storage facility outside Zurich. It contained originals of the appeals, including Frank’s. It had been ordered destroyed years ago, but he had kept it as insurance. He said the file also contained a memo that listed the names of every athlete whose cases had been quietly dismissed. There were 43 names. Frank was number nine.