If you insist on starting each new year with a sense of childlike wonderment, you will be stunned by news that Russia has missed the New Year’s Eve deadline to allow the World Anti-Doping Agency access to the Moscow lab at the heart of its massive state-sponsored doping programme.

This development is also incredible to wide-eyed Wada president Craig Reedie, who professes himself “bitterly disappointed”, while the head of Usada, Travis Tygart, brands the situation “a total joke”. The latter verdict seems the more realistic. Back in November, Sir Craig justified his recommendation that Russia be readmitted to international competition, despite it having not met his organisation’s own conditions for that to happen. “I find it very hard to believe,” he found it very hard to believe, “that the guarantees, made to us by the Russian authorities, that they won’t deliver.”

Wada accused of being ‘played’ after Russians miss doping data deadline Read more

Yes, well. BELIEVE THE MAGIC, BUDDY. In a clear provocation to writers who prefer to fall back on at least one Princess Bride reference per column (ie me) Craig went on to say that the idea of Russia missing this deadline was “inconceivable”. Inconceivable! As Inigo Montoya is forced to remark in that movie: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” And here we are. I can’t believe that former 1960s badminton starlet Craig Reedie has had his arse handed to him yet again by former KGB colonel Vladimir Putin. Honestly, what are the chances? Also, how many arses does Craig have? At this rate he is surely down to the one he talks out of every time he makes a decision in the interests of a non-compliant, provenly dirty country as opposed to the clean and compliant athletes who should be his absolute priority.

Before we go on, a reminder of the background. In 2016, Russia was found to have operated the biggest sports cheating programme of the 21st century. A German TV investigation claimed that up to 99% of Russian athletes were doping; subsequent individual bans revealed that even curlers and visually impaired Paralympians were at it. Russia was finally kicked out of the Winter Olympics in late 2017, and embarked upon a profound exercise in self-reflection and soul-searching. I’m kidding, of course. It cocked an eyebrow and settled in for a short wait.

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Keen to sink to its expectations, Wada took 10 months to recommend Russian readmission, despite the country having not complied with two of the crucial recommendations of the McLaren report: one, to even admit a state-sponsored doping programme had existed, and two, to grant Wada access to its Moscow lab. So you could argue that compliance of one sort had technically occurred – Wada had complied with Russia, as opposed to the other way round.

Alas, this wasn’t the glass-half-full take adopted by outraged athletes. Former cross-country skier Beckie Scott resigned as chair of Wada’s athlete committee in protest, while last October Reedie was pointedly not invited to a White House summit dedicated to reforming his organisation. Still, with the deadline clock ticking, everyone mostly had to wait. The next Wada meeting, at which any penalty on Russia could be enforced, is scheduled for 14 January.

And so to last week’s not-entirely-sensational plot twist. Wada pitched up as billed in Moscow, only to be told its equipment was not authorised. Yup, the old “wrong equipment” gambit. Russia would love to help – it really would – but despite having made no equipment stipulations before the visit, things had now apparently become a problem.

So what now? The new expectation, apparently, is that Russia will allow some sort of access in the 11th hour, outside the deadline but just before the 14 January meeting. This is surely taking the piss. Indeed, there is a neat irony to the fact that this all began with Russia literally taking the piss – passing tainted urine samples through a hole in the lab wall in exchange for clean ones.

Furthermore, as most people know, the thing about the other sort of drug users is that you can’t keep enabling them. Their compulsion forces them to become very good liars, and they tell you they’ll change as a way of prolonging their refusal to do so. The accepted wisdom is that they really need to hit rock bottom – diving down filthy bogs in search of suppositories; licking novichok off doorknobs – before you can actually believe them. Without wishing to venture too far out on a limb, I don’t think Russia has reached its personal rock bottom just yet. Everything it has done thus far has been the equivalent of a celebrity’s tactical visit to an Arizona rehab called something like Cloudwinds. It reeks of defensive action mandated by your agent.

Any reputation Sir Craig Reedie’s Wada has left – and for me it exists in entirely undetectable traces – will be gone if this missed deadline is excused. Reedie’s frequent refrain is that the athletes don’t understand the method to his apparent madness. On the contrary, they understand it very well. It is one rule for them, and another for a corrupt state. If this wasn’t made clear when the tainted Winter Olympics in Sochi were used as a curtain-raiser for Putin’s invasion of Crimea, it certainly has been ever since.

On a positive note, the increasingly vocal protestations of athletes last year – from those calling time-up on Wada to the remarkable survivors’ testimonies of Larry Nassar’s USA gymnast victims – suggest they are more than aware that sport is mostly run for countries and administrators, and not for them. I can only wish an increasingly powerful 2019 to the talent, and a year of greater reckoning for those who leech off it.