Shamed and pilloried, the head of the Russian Olympic Committee resigned, and Russian leadership spoke of serious reform. “The place we got in Vancouver is not worthy of our country,” said Vitaly Mutko, the sports minister at the time and a friend of Putin. “We have to do everything we can to restore our leadership in world sports.” He promised to take “personal control” over the preparations for the Sochi Olympics, where the stakes would be far higher and which were just four years away. What if Russian athletes flopped on their home turf? It was a nightmare scenario.

This is how we got to Tuesday’s ban of the entire Russian team and various Russian officials, including Mutko, from the 2018 Winter Olympics, just two months before the opening ceremony, in South Korea. There is a straight line from Vancouver to Pyeongchang, with a sordid stop in Sochi.

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Authoritarian regimes love organized sporting events, like the Olympics, and Russia was one of the initiators of that love affair, back when it was the Soviet Union. For decades, the Kremlin poured money into Olympic sports. It was an important piece of propaganda for both the world and the Soviet home front: We are a superpower and our people are superpeople. Parents eagerly turned over their children to Olympic factories that would make their young ones into athletes who could do their country proud, and get their families a little extra something, be it more food or Western electronics. Olympic events like the famed 1980 hockey match between the Unites States and the Soviet Union—known as “the Miracle on Ice”—offered easy analogies for larger geopolitical struggles. To be a true global power, you had to defeat your enemies in every arena.

Putin, like most people who survived the Soviet Union, never lost that vision of the Olympics as a proxy for geopolitics. It is why the flop at the 2010 Olympics stunned and humiliated Russia as much as it did. Russia looked in the mirror and didn’t like what it saw. It found that despite a decade of unprecedented economic good fortune, of surging oil prices and rising salaries, of the glitz and glamour of its cities, the country was rotten at its core. In the two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, its infrastructure had crumbled and was never rebuilt. The glitz, it turned out, was just a patina of false prosperity.

Mutko was unsparing in his assessment when the Olympic delegation returned, humiliated, to Moscow. “There are a lot of problems,” he said in March 2010. “Over the years, we’ve frittered away our sport science and lost our human potential.” He noted that foreign athletes were trained by Russian coaches who had left Russia, and that in many sports, there was no new generation waiting in the wings. “There’s also the problem of doping,” he said. “Some of us can no longer think of preparing athletes without including doping substances. We began to fight doping with more conviction.” All of these, he said, “are systemic problems” and the Sports Ministry was working to solve them. “Neither I nor the Ministry of Sport deny our responsibility for the performance of the Russian team at the Olympics in Vancouver,” he said. “We will do a serious analysis, and there will be changes, both in terms of organization and personnel, on the basis of our experience in Vancouver.”