Has a performance ever felt less enhanced than that of the World Anti‑Doping Agency? The body notionally responsible for keeping sport clean is on the brink of lifting Russia’s doping ban, about 10 minutes after that country’s state agents were discovered to have spent much of the Sochi Winter Olympics passing clean piss through a hole in a testing lab wall, and swapping it with athlete piss marginally less tainted than the lake inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

But hey. Russia would like you to know that they’re just not those people any more. I imagine the speech requesting readmittance to the fold ran along the lines of Paul Calf’s on his ex-girlfriend. “I’d do anything to get her back. I’d give up drinking. Well, I’d cut down … on spirits … in the week. The point is I’d CHANGE.”

And so with Russia, who have made a small series of will-this-do gestures to imply they wouldn’t try anything like the whole state-sponsored shadow-lab thing again. Sure, it could be regarded as slightly unfortunate that it was revealed only last week that two Russian agents were intercepted on their way to break into a Swiss chemical weapons lab. But just because Russia has a load of do-or-die merchants willing to do the old switcheroo with some nerve agent, it doesn’t mean they wouldn’t piously draw the line at handling bobsledder wee.

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That, certainly, seems to be Wada’s position on this, though it will make its final decision , at a meeting in Seychelles. (Where else?)

Before we go on, then, a recap on where we find ourselves. Back in 2016, when Russia was discovered to have masterminded the biggest doping scandal of the 21st century, it was decreed that the only way back in to competition for this sporting pariah was to comply fully with all the conditions of Wada’s so-called roadmap, which include accepting the findings of the McLaren report into the affair, and granting Wada access to Moscow’s anti-doping laboratory. Which I urge you not to picture as a single phone ringing out in an empty office.

Alas, in a shocking development – anticipated by only a few million realists – Russia has not complied with those two conditions. And incredibly (except not), Wada’s solution to that appears to be to change its own conditions. If Russia won’t comply with what you’ve asked for, change what you ask for, right? That way compliance of a sort has happened. To wit, Wada has complied with Russia, rather than the other way round.

Or as Wada itself put it: “The fact is that leadership requires flexibility. The proposals … are grounded in pragmatism and are nuanced interpretations of the roadmap in order to bring matters to a conclusion and to not allow the significant progress that the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (Rusada) has made over the last two years, under Wada’s supervision, to be undone.” A statement which clumsily implies that Rusada would simply abandon even its own window-dressing if not fast-tracked back.

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Alas, while this might all be highly acceptable to Rusada, it is not acceptable to a growing list of outraged athletes, who have signed a letter saying so. It is not acceptable to the former cross-country skier Beckie Scott, who has resigned from Wada’s compliance review committee over the development. And it is not acceptable to the Institute of National Anti-Doping Organisations, the testing agency alliance who this week released a statement declaring: “Any reasonable person would conclude that Russia has not yet fulfilled its obligations to the global sporting community.”

Well quite. The only entity who has fulfilled its obligations to the global sporting community even less is Wada, who has spent the best part of two decades phoning it in, and still can’t seem to understand why people might imagine it a hopeless case.

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Anyone paying attention will long ago have lost count of the times Wada has undermined its own credibility. To pluck a single example from the air, let’s journey back to 2013, when a whistleblower informed it that Jamaica’s testing programme had in effect not operated in the five or six months leading up to the 2012 Olympics. Having been initially swatted away by the Jamaican Anti‑Doping Commission, Wada finally contrived to organise an extraordinary audit of procedures. They arrived on the island late one Monday night, and were on a plane out first thing Wednesday. “I have a personal problem in what you can do in 12 hours,” Jamaica’s most senior drug tester, Dr Paul Wright, later told the BBC. “They were only really here on Tuesday, and four hours of that was at a dinner function with the prime minister.”

It is not for us to speculate on the dinners that have now led Wada to drop its own demands of Russia. But the reality is simple: most people with a passing knowledge of anti-doping simply don’t believe what they are seeing half the time they watch sport.

Much of this is specifically the fault of Wada, whose failure to enforce even its own demands undermines not just its own existence, but the entire believability of international sporting competition. It’s bad enough when the cheats do it, but when the body designed to stop them cheating is as helpfully quarter-arsed as this, perhaps the time has come to inquire again after its continuing point? Otherwise Russia has found just another way to take the piss.