Russia was banned from the Winter Olympics. It still showed up in full force

Just to recap, the Russians didn’t just supply performance-enhancing drugs to scores of athletes. We’ve seen that act before. This time it constructed an actual building in Sochi next to the laboratory that tested athlete samples. It then drilled a small hole in the shared wall. Each night after the lab closed, it had workers on either side pass clean samples in and dirty samples out.

A few predictable things happened. Russia won the most medals. No Russians tested positive for PEDs. The man who orchestrated it, Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, who much later acknowledged the scheme, was awarded a prestigious honor by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Once the scam was uncovered, Rodchenkov fled to America fearing for his safety, which seems reasonable after two of his cohorts turned up dead. Just a coincidence, of course.

Regardless, individual athletes can take their case to the Court of Arbitration in Sport and win an appeal. Many have. Many of those victories are based on a lack of direct evidence. WADA acknowledges it sometimes lacks direct evidence but notes that’s because the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (an all-timer of an oxymoron) destroyed most of the direct evidence when it took the dirty samples and replaced them with the clean samples.

“It is no surprise you don’t have all the evidence you want,” WADA director general Olivier Niggli said here Thursday.

It’s quite a deal, really. Russia cheated so thoroughly that it got banned. But by cheating so thoroughly it can’t be banned.

And so here come the Olympic Athletes from Russia.

Basically, the IOC just caved to the Russians, allowing Putin to influence the decision-making process and achieve his preferred result.

We in America wouldn’t know about such things.