In a perverse way, Russia has done a favor to international sport. For too long now, as the stench of scandal has wafted through the Olympic Games, international soccer and other global sports, governing bodies have reacted timidly, throwing out a bad egg or two but little else.

The scale and organization of Russian cheating, however, made any halfway measures impossible: The International Association of Athletics Federations and the International Olympic Committee were entirely right to bar Russia’s track and field team from participating in the Rio Games.

Russia, of course, blamed everybody else. “Only people who are lazy don’t kick Russia in sports these days,” complained Dmitry Svishchev, chairman of the Russian parliamentary committee on sports.

It may be that he and other Russians really don’t get why they’ve been sanctioned. Once their doping program was outed, senior sports officials seemed to believe that a bit of public contrition coupled with some superficial corrective measures would be enough. It had before — a Times investigation, for example, found that the World Anti-Doping Agency mishandled multiple warnings about Russia, and even forwarded a whistleblower’s charge back to the Russians she was accusing.