Almost every effort to curb the scourge of performance-enhancing drugs contains a clause or caveat that extracts the teeth from the tiger.

In the case of Russia's four-year ban from competing in major sporting championships, this deceitful dentistry means most Russian athletes will not be banned from the Olympics at all.

At least not those who can prove "they were not involved and did not benefit from these fraudulent acts" — as if such proof is possible in an era when Lance Armstrong, the most notorious drug cheat in sports history, never returned a positive test.

At next year's Tokyo Olympics, these "clean" Russians will compete as Olympic Athletes from Russia.

A similar compromise was reached to allow Russians to compete at Rio 2016, even as Russian Government agents were smashing computers containing the records of their systematic cheating — perhaps with the same hammers used to destroy computers containing records of the corrupt 2018 FIFA World Cup bid.

Subsequently, 271 of the original 387 athletes nominated by Russian federations went to Rio despite the claim by Russian discus thrower Yevgeniya Pecherina that "most (Russian) athletes dope, around 99 per cent".

This get-out clause ensuring notionally "innocent" athletes are not punished for the sins of their inordinately well-performed countrymen tugs at some heartstrings.

Why should a young gymnast or even a gym-built boxer be punished for the sins of state-sponsored dopers and miss what might be the greatest moment of their sporting lives?

The answer is surely obvious even to those pampered IOC grand poobahs, media rights holders and others rushing to console and placate a powerful nation so as to maintain their own cushy positions or maximise their Olympic investment.

Patently, these athletes have been produced under the auspices of a sports system that flagrantly and systematically cheated. Only by punishing that entire system and not merely those caught holding the syringe can real change be assured.

Otherwise, at the Olympics at least, the Russian ban will be little more effective than the sports ban on apartheid-era South Africa might have been if athletes who could "prove they aren't racist" were excluded.

Russia hosted the World Cup in 2018 despite allegations of corruption during the bidding process. ( AP: Pavel Golovkin )

It might be argued that when he created the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin envisaged an event in which individuals from many nations competed rather than countries themselves going head-to-head.

There was no medal table at the first modern Olympics and many athletes turned up spontaneously and without national endorsement. Their talent was their passport.

This idyllic notion lasted as long it took host nations and the most dominant sporting countries to discover the propaganda value of what was, right up until the 1970s, one of the few universally visible sporting carnivals.

By the time the German team was goosestepping its way around the main stadium in Berlin in 1936, you would be hard-pressed arguing the Olympics were anything other than an intensely nationalistic event; an arena were international prestige was determined with the toss of a javelin or the plop of a well-executed dive.

More recently in Australia the supposed reputational damage caused by the failure to meet extravagant medal projections was used by the Australian Olympic Committee to shame successive federal governments into dolling out ever-greater — though never fully justified — taxpayer funding.

Yet, the same officials who have tethered sport to the public purse strings have helped make a case for individuals from a corrupt sporting state to participate in the Olympics — something that clearly weakens WADA's sanctions.

While the Russian Government is publicly offended by the four-year ban, the sight of supposedly "clean" Russian athletes crossing the line in Tokyo will surely ease the pain and, consequently, lessen the compulsion to invoke systemic change.

This is a clear betrayal of those athletes who believe they are owed the right to compete on a level playing field and, in the case of Australian swimmer Mack Horton, have actively campaigned for it.

Russia has voiced its disapproval at the four-year ban handed down by WADA. ( AP: Pavel Golovkin )

A few suspect Russian competitors will be banished. But the system that helped create them will be well-represented.

Coincidentally, the Russian "ban" came as efforts to mount a bid to host the 2032 Olympics in Brisbane intensified.

There was even the wistful belief in the northern capital that Russia's disgrace could be Brisbane's good fortune with a potential rival eliminated from a bidding war.

Although, of course, it would be no more surprising for the IOC to gift disgraced Russia an Olympics soon after the ban is lifted than it was for FIFA to grant the same country the 2018 World Cup despite the putrid smell of corruption around that bid.

Brisbane presents as a "nice bid". A growing and more confident city with a glistening façade is trying to dip its toes in the international waters that only big brothers Melbourne and Sydney usually occupy.

But then, Australia as a whole had that façade when it attempted to win the 2022 World Cup and found itself inveigled in the kind of corruption and duplicity that remains endemic in international sport.

The kind that means a ban is not necessarily really a ban.

So to Brisbane's sports enthusiasts, a word of warning: be careful what you bid for.