There they were, Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, and Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee. There they were, side-by-side, champagne flute by champagne flute, both wearing blue suits and expressions of importance at a "welcoming party" on the eve of the Sochi Olympics.

The rest of the world was already skeptical of the 2014 Games. Suspicious of the whispers of bribes paid out to win the bid away from Austria. Suspicious of the $51 billion in construction costs to turn a former swampland into something that looked like a still-uncompleted movie set, fake storefronts with nothing behind them. Suspicious of the missing dogs and political rivals, both reportedly scrubbed from the streets.

In Putin, IOC aristocrats such as Bach thought they had found their kindred spirit, willing to pay and do anything for Olympic glory.

Construct lavish and ridiculous facilities that play to the IOC's over-inflated sense of worth? Check. Suck up to IOC leadership like they are all-powerful? Check. Toss a little something extra on the side to assure the voting on host city goes smooth? Cough. Cough.

The New York Times on Thursday reported the latest, and most damning, proof yet that Russia did more than just host the 2014 Winter Olympics: it conspired to fix it. Grigory Rodchenkov, the director of Russia's anti-doping laboratory at the time, detailed to the newspaper how a state-run program was able to use being the host nation to swap out dirty urine samples with clean ones to assure the eligibility of dozens of Russian athletes.

There couldn't be a more apt postscript to the Sochi Games than this: The whole thing was a fake.

The IOC, thinking it had found its latest desperate despot with billions to burn on it while cooing in its ear, was actually being played for fools, as Russia used the home-country advantage to attempt to rig the entire event.

Ah, Thomas Bach, how could you have not seen this coming?

The Times story is surprising only in its breadth and detail.

Of course the Russians were going to cheat. They spent tens of billions, not counting whatever bribe money was or was not doled out, to host the Games. They weren't doing all that to wind up struggling to win medals, finishing sixth like they did in Vancouver four years earlier.

It would have been out of character had they just lost, Putin just saying they'll get them next time. If you're going to let them host the Games, of course they were going to put an over-the-top doping production together.

Everything in Sochi was crooked, not just the poorly laid sidewalks. Just about everyone who was there spent three weeks looking around at the ridiculousness of these Games, at the shoddy construction and bizarre planning and the senseless logistics and had doubts.

Everyone, apparently, but Bach and his friends.

"In a dark-of-night operation," the Times wrote, "Russian antidoping experts and members of the intelligence services surreptitiously replaced urine samples tainted by performance-enhancing drugs with clean urine collected months earlier, somehow breaking into the supposedly tamper-proof bottles that are the standard at international competitions, Dr. Rodchenkov said. For hours each night, they worked in a shadow laboratory lit by a single lamp, passing bottles of urine through a hand-size hole in the wall, to be ready for testing the next day, he said."

View photos Alexander Legkov is among those implicated in the alleged doping scandal. (AP) More

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