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Photo by Grzegorz Celejewski/Agencja Gazeta via Reuters

There is one intractable problem that makes any attempt to deal with the Russian scandal feel pointless. It was just so big that trying to legislate it after the fact is always going to be unwieldy. Consider one of the stories of Grey Cup week, the suspension this season of Winnipeg Blue Bombers running back Andrew Harris for a positive steroid test. He insisted he didn’t do anything intentionally wrong and was the victim of a tainted supplement, but he was punished anyway. This is what happens with steroids: if you are found to have something illegal in your body, the sanctions do not care how it came to be there. It is an absolute-liability offence, and the only evidence needed to convict are the scientific tests.

But the Russian scandal, backed by mountains of documentary evidence from whistleblowers who were both athletes and scientists, went into the highest reaches of that country’s sport system. Doping efforts are normally secretive and subtle. Russia went the other way, deciding from the top to dope the hell out of anyone who seemed like a medal threat and see what happened. What happened is that Russia topped the medal table at Sochi 2014.

When the anti-doping program is in fact running the precise opposite of that, all the usual avenues of evidence have been utterly corrupted. WADA and the CAS have for years now been trying to apply the normal standards to Russia’s athletes, but they were part of an extraordinarily abnormal doping effort. WADA has been bringing a dull knife to a gun fight.

Perhaps this will all end with Russia being sanctioned in the manner that WADA’s committee is now advising. Perhaps the eventual punishment will be unsparing. Perhaps, but we have been here before. How did that go?