Stepanova banned as IOC clears way for Russians

So now we know. Scores, if not hundreds, of Russian competitors dressed in official kit will march behind the national flag at the Olympic Games opening ceremony in Rio de Janeiro a week on Friday.

Shortly afterwards, the first Russian athlete will climb the podium and stare into the middle distance as their anthem plays and a medal is placed around their neck.

And this despite the dirty samples passed through a mouse hole by secret service agents at the Sochi Winter Olympics. Despite 312 falsified results over five years across the vast majority of Olympic disciplines after the Russian sports ministry intervened in 577 positive tests. Despite the wilful subversion of at least two Olympics in London and Sochi and other major events including the 2013 world athletics championships in Moscow and their 2015 swimming equivalent in Kazan.

Meanwhile, incredibly, the courageous athlete without whom none of the above would have come to light – the whistleblower Yuliya Stepanova – will not be allowed to compete because the International Olympic Committee brought in a rule that stated any Russians who have been previously banned for doping will not be able to take part.

The world athletics governing body had hoped she would be able to take to the track in a neutral vest as an example to others. Not so fast, said the IOC, while clearing the way for many other Russian athletes to compete.

That not only created a clanging inconsistency with other countries whose previously banned athletes will not be similarly affected – the American sprinter Justin Gatlin among them – but created the unfortunate impression that perhaps the most significant whistleblowers in sporting history had been chucked under a bus in favour of placating Vladimir Putin.

It also appears entirely inconsistent with an earlier decision that forced the IOC in 2011 to drop a rule that stopped banned athletes from participating in the Olympics that followed their sanction, because it was deemed unlawful under double jeopardy rules.

Thomas Bach, the IOC president who is close to Putin, said the Stepanovs would instead be invited to the trouble-hit Rio Olympics as guests, suggesting the invitation would be "an encouragement for all future whistleblowers". Some encouragement. Rancid affair The World Anti-Doping Agency, itself with questions to answer over how long it took to uncover this rancid affair, along with 14 national anti-doping organisations had called for Russia to be banned outright – with the caveat that athletes who could absolutely prove they were untainted by the system would be able to compete under a neutral banner.

But faced with the opportunity to make a powerful stand, however painful it might have been, the IOC instead chose obfuscation, confusion and chaos.

Less than a fortnight before the opening ceremony, international federations for the 28 Olympic sports will now be asked to assess all their Russian entrants to see whether they have been subject to sufficient international testing outside their homeland.

It is impossible to see how consistency will be maintained across the various sports. Some have already indicated they plan to take a more lenient view than the IAAF, which decided that all but two Russian athletes – one of them Stepanova – had been so tainted by the system that they should be banned.

The ink was barely dry on the IOC statement when the International Tennis Federation announced all seven Russians in its sport would compete. Many more will soon follow.

Almost by its nature the IOC, which leverages billions in broadcasting and sponsorship revenue from the five rings, is a creature of complacency and compromise. Partly that is because it has to try to build a consensus from disparate belief systems. That can be a good thing. Not here.

The crisis sparked when the Stepanovs (he a disgusted Russian anti-doping official, she an athlete who had cheated) approached a German documentary maker in 2014 has mutated into a contagion that could poison the entire Olympic movement.

Meanwhile, the usual straw men have been wheeled out. There are those who say that to press for a blanket ban on athletes competing under the Russian flag is to somehow be continuing to wage the Cold War by proxy.

Or that Russia’s willingness to host major sporting events should somehow count in its favour. As though squandering $51bn (€4.6bn) on the corrupt spectacle of the Sochi Olympics or a successful 2018 World Cup bid over which serious questions remain is a good thing. Doping regimen Following humiliation at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games, the wheels were set in motion for the most elaborate state-sanctioned doping regimen since East Germany in the 1970s, taking in a run of home events from the 2013 world athletics championships to the 2018 World Cup. It was a programme undertaken in a spirit of absolute cynicism in total contravention of the supposed ideals of the Olympics.

Of course, the debate around Russia should not deflect from wider questions facing the IOC, Wada and world sport over their handling of this affair. If it had been faced sooner, we would not be scrambling for a last-ditch sticking plaster.

There is clearly a desperate need for wholesale reform of the approach to doping and corruption in world sport. Many other sporting nations have major problems. History has shown that the US and the UK are far from immune.

Yet for scale and cynicism the Russian system, for now, stands alone. That is why it would have been right to make an example of it, even if that resulted in a very high price for some athletes just a fortnight before the Games.

In any sane world the IOC would long rue the day it passed up the opportunity to do so. Instead, this fudged sidestep will simply increase already sky-high public cynicism about the workings of this cosy club.

Asked how he would feel to be competing against a Russian athlete this summer knowing what we now know, Bach, a former fencer and Adidas executive, said he would be “absolutely comfortable and fine” with it. Treble Caprioskas all round. For the rest us, not so much. Guardian Service