Perhaps Vladimir Putin had always planned to confirm on Wednesday — as if anyone ever doubted it — that he would run for a fourth presidential term next year. Maybe he did so to “bury” the shattering news of Russia’s ban from the Winter Olympics in South Korea next year. Either way, the banishment from February’s Pyeongchang Games is, in international terms, a stinging humiliation. Russia is not only the first nation ever to be excluded from an Olympics for doping, but faces this punishment in the same year it is hosting the football World Cup.
The ban is belated but entirely justified. Even while Russia was hosting the most expensive winter games ever in Sochi in 2014, it was engaged behind the scenes in one of the most elaborate doping cover-ups in sporting history. Russian athletes’ urine samples were systematically switched for clean ones to hide drug-taking that continued throughout the games. The Federal Security Service assisted by working out how to open undetected, supposedly tamper-proof sample bottles.
The International Olympic Committee should have acted last year and barred Russia from the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, when the World Anti-Doping Agency revealed explosive findings on Moscow’s state-sponsored doping weeks before the games.