Russia doping scandal: Ban needs to hit hard - with total explosion - to bring Russia to its senses

The country is 18 to 24 months off full compliance in drug testing, we now know

Russia's Sport Minister Vitaly Mutko (right) with FIFA President Gianni Infantino (GETTY)

Russia is operating on such a remote and alien parallel that it feels it will be years before its athletes can claim a sense of entitlement to compete at an Olympics.

Vladimir Putin was asked on Friday for his thoughts on how 300 armed Russians had beaten hell out English fans in Marseilles last weekend. “I don’t know how 200 [Russian] fans could hurt several thousand Englishmen” he said, playing to the domestic audience whose sense of nationhood will no doubt be titivated by the idea of their tooled-up compatriots going to work on the British.

In a sporting sense, this is a country so entirely dislocated from an ethical parameter and sense of fair play that it was no substantial surprise to learn from the IAAF on Friday that any hopes of Russia coming into the fold and comply with an accepted standard of anti-doping compliance have been dashed.

It’s eight months since we discovered the full enormity of the Russian institutionalised doping – its malign shadow “second laboratory” in Moscow, intelligence service officers infiltrating anti-doping work, cheats who had stolen in on London Olympics and sent doped competitors here. But almost nothing has changed.

There has been a charm offensive as Russia has attempted to demonstrate in recent weeks that its athletes should be allowed to compete in Brazil. The PR company Burson Marsteller has been retained to communicate the message. Sports minister Vitaly Mutko, who had initially described the WADA report as a “political hit job” suddenly started admitting “serious mistakes” had been made, and organising tours for foreign journalists of anti-doping facilities.

It was all a sham. Russia is 18 to 24 months off full compliance in drug testing, we now know. Its culture, where doping is concerned, has “not changed materially at all,” the IAAF’s Rune Andersen declared at a press conference convened yesterday to explain that Russian athletes will not compete at the Rio Olympics. “The deep-seated tolerance for doping appears not to have changed materially.” Russia was “unwilling to accept the nature of doping.” Remember, a “deeply rooted culture of cheating” is what a WADA commissioned 322-page report found Russia to be possess back in November, as it recommended a full ban from international competitions. “Sabotaged” is what it found London 2012 to have been.

The IAAF is to be commended for the zeal with which it has interrogated the Russians’ response to the WADA report. The fact that the initial journalistic evidence of institutionalised doping was initially described by IAAF president Lord Coe as a "declaration of war" can be put aside now. So can any hope that the journalist’s work might be credited. Coe is never inclined to apologise. His bumptiousness is deeply unattractive. But it is not the primary issue. More significant in the here and now is how Russia might pay the penalty of the perverted culture that permeates all the way down from Putin.

The talk of a western political conspiracy materialised quickly at the press conference on Friday, when the state-sponsored television station’s representative stood up to ask Coe her question. There will be plenty more in that vein, in the weeks before the Olympics start. The same accusation was levelled at English journalists in Lille, northern France this week, when the question of the Russian gangs’ brutal beating of the English cropped up.

The distorted sense of victimhood reveals that it will take a lot to shake Russian sport out of its malaise. The Rio expulsion, of itself will not be enough. The quest to drag the country out of the dark ages and towards a transparent and modern sporting infrastructure in which athletes can be safe requires nothing less than entirely ostracising Russian sport. That should certainly include a blanket Olympic ban for Russia.

The cloud of suspicion does not just hover over athletics, in any case. Recent reports in The Times and Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung claimed that two senior Russian anti-doping officials offered to stop testing Russian swimmers for money in the build-up to London 2012. The pair are alleged to have asked the national swimming federation for three million roubles (currently £32,200) a year to remove “two or three leading swimmers” from the testing group. It sounded ominously familiar.

Around the edges of the IAAF’s ruling on Friday, we already saw the creep of compromise. A change to the IAAF rules allow those athletes who train outside of Russian Federation to demonstrate their eligibility for Rio. There will be as few as five of them we are told, yet allowing merely one an Olympic presence is enough to give Putin and his people the potential satisfaction of seeing the Russia flag raised. Let those who train outside the Russian Federation take the same punishment of all the others. Let them feel the sting of indignation at being excluded and turn it onto the deniers who officiate over this iniquitous doping regime.

The exclusion needs to hit as hard in its own realm as the economic sanctions Russia faces. Russia and its autocratic cronies, with their random indifference to human rights, already find their ways to push their propaganda and circumvent the rules. The handing of the IAAF’s World Championships to the brutal state of Azerbaijan demonstrated that money talks. So no more loopholes and back door deals. A regime that serially dopes and serially cheats must be seen for what it is: a stain on sport. Until that changes, let it remain a pariah state.