Russia continues to abuse the Olympics – yet the world shrugs, never learning its lesson

It is instructive to view Putin’s general disdain for the rest of the world through his disdain for the Olympics

When an Olympic team arrives at the Olympic Village, they are greeted with a welcome ceremony, and the head of their team, the chef de mission, signs the Olympic Truce Wall, which, while obviously not a legal document, was introduced to compel participating countries to observe a period of international peace while the games take place.

The Russian team signed this wall on their way in to the Beijing Olympics, both in 2008 and again, not yet two weeks ago. During the 2008 opening ceremony, while Vladimir Putin chatted with George W Bush, he launched an invasion of Georgia, sending his tanks into the two disputed regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Russian signed the truce wall again, barely days ago, all the while amassing tens of thousands of troops at the Ukrainian border, in an act of brinksmanship that has been combined with its now traditional television propaganda war, in which its ministers talk with a sophistry so crude it is barely sophistry, and more like outright lying.

To conflate war with the Olympics is rather glib, but the Olympics is one of the few truly global events. World leaders take it seriously enough, and it is instructive to view Putin’s general disdain for the rest of the world through his disdain for the Olympics.

Russia has been stripped of 15 medals which it won at London 2012, five of them gold. During the games it hosted, in Sochi in 2014, the industrial scale of its cheating was laid bare. Since details of that scandal were dragged into the daylight by investigative journalists (none of it was discovered by the International Olympic Committee, or the World Anti Doping Agency), Russia has been banned from competing at the Olympics.

Instead, its athletes compete as the Russian Olympic Committee. At Beijing 2022, said Russian athletes arrived at the opening ceremony with the Russian flag woven into their uniforms. In place of their national anthem, which is banned, is a Tchaikovsky piano concerto.

Now, their 15-year-old star figure skater, Kamila Valieva, has failed a drugs test, and we are being told that the failed test may have come from accidentally ingesting a banned substance after sharing a glass of water with her grandfather. She has won one gold medal already, of which she may yet be stripped, and has now won a second gold, but will not be allowed to collect the medal. There will be no medal ceremony, which is an insult to those who finished second and third, but who may yet find their results upgraded.

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Russia has, in short, abused the Olympics for more than a decade. Yet the International Olympic Committee continues to genuflect before them. Its next planned international meeting will take place in Russia, a country which is currently suspended from its movement.

You would think that all this should be sufficient, as a decade-long lesson, from what is to be gained from extending to Putin and his cronies the reasonableness, and the benefit of doubt, that characterises relationships between countries who believe in rules-based international relations.

But this lesson has not been learned. Currently, troops may or may not be being moved back from the Ukrainian border. There is talk of de-escalation, but the UK government has made clear it does not believe such talk.

Whatever should happen in the coming days, no one can say that they haven’t been warned.