After all, if the report is true, it would mean that he was cheated out of two silver medals in Sochi, and perhaps countless others in previous competitions.

“I don’t feel comfortable going to my next Olympic Games knowing that the Russians will be there because they’ve cheated like this,” he said. “I say, ban them from the sport and the Olympics completely until they can prove that they’ve cleaned up their act and prove that they can be on a level playing field.”

To be clear: Thursday’s revelations didn’t emerge from nowhere. Holcomb, who has dedicated 18 of his 36 years to his bobsledding career, said some Russian athletes had told him that doping should be permissible except on competition days.

Indeed, Russia’s doping problem has been an open secret for years.

Last fall, an independent investigation run by the former WADA president Richard W. Pound revealed that Russia’s track and field program was rife with corruption and doping cover-ups. It was enough for that program to be suspended from international competition until it proves that it can follow the rules. A new scandal early this year involving the widespread use of a banned drug, meldonium, by Russian athletes made it seem as if Russia had no interest in fixing things.

Unfortunately, WADA and the I.O.C. have a record of going soft when dealing with Russia.

While the secret lab was expunging dirty samples in Sochi, WADA’s president, Craig Reedie, was praising Russia’s antidoping effort. In the wake of yet another round of Russian athletes testing positive, Reedie said it looked as if Russia had improved its antidoping controls, that perhaps it had learned its lesson.

“I always tried to be a glass-half-full man,” Reedie said.

Half-full, even when athletes wrote to him in recent months demanding — begging for — a deeper investigation of Russian sports beyond track and field. Beckie Scott, an Olympic gold medalist in cross-country skiing and the chairwoman of WADA’s athletes’ advisory council, said Thursday that she and other athletes were frustrated by the continuing inaction of the bodies empowered to do something to stop Russian doping.