Christine Brennan

USA TODAY Sports

KANSAS CITY — The 2018 Winter Olympic Games are a year away, but the battle over whether Russia and its state-sponsored doping machine should be allowed to compete began in earnest Thursday.

That’s when U.S. Figure Skating president Sam Auxier became one of the rare international sports leaders, and the first U.S. national governing body official, to have the courage to say Russia does not belong in the Games.

“I don’t think they should be able to,” Auxier said in response to a question from USA TODAY Sports at a news conference kicking off the 2017 U.S. figure skating championships.

“I mean, it’s state sponsored, it was … a huge program, well-coordinated, to cheat and they should pay a pretty stiff penalty. I think the only way the IOC (International Olympic Committee) and the ISU (International Skating Union) maintain any level of integrity is to take a strong stand and weigh a strong penalty for those actions.”

With those simple sentences, Auxier instantly made U.S. figure skating a vital player — perhaps the vital player — in the on-going global conversation that hopefully will result in the complete banishment of the Russian delegation from the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

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If this sounds familiar, it’s because the international sports world dealt with the same issue heading into the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics – and didn’t deal with it particularly well.

Although the worldwide track and field governing body, known as the International Association of Athletics Federations, fought long and hard for the banishment of Russian athletes, International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach failed miserably to meet that challenge.

The end result? Only one-third of the Russian Olympic delegation was banned from Rio, leading to questions galore about whether anyone could trust the events that did include Russians.

The massive nature of Russian doping was confirmed in two reports commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency in which it was revealed that more than 1,000 Russian athletes were part of the state-sponsored doping system designed to win medals at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, as well as other international competitions.

As frustrated as sports officials have been around the world, particularly in Western nations, they have been extremely reticent to speak up.

Until now.