Between 2011 and 2015 the Russian state orchestrated a doping programme that enabled 1,000 athletes in 30 sports to take banned performance-enhancing drugs. The sports ministry, the secret service and the national anti-doping agency collaborated in the systematic corruption of the 2012 London Olympics and Paralympics, the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and Paralympics, and the 2013 World Athletics Championships in Moscow. At a press conference in London on Friday morning, Professor Richard McLaren, head of the independent body appointed to investigate the conspiracy, provided irrefutable proof of both the scheme and its cover-up. And in doing so he exposed, with surgical precision, a great gaping wound in the Olympic movement.

Over the course of two hours, McLaren and his chief investigator, Martin Dubbey, detailed the evolution of the Russian doping programme. They moved from the “uncontrolled chaos” of its makeshift beginnings, where “top-level national-team coaches” were selling performance-enhancing drugs to athletes who would then be protected by corrupt doping control officers, to its final fruition as an “institutionalised and disciplined” strategy in which competitors were able to dope in the run-up to and even during major competitions. “Well-known and elite athletes” were protected by the false reporting of lab results and the practice of sample-swapping, in which tainted urine samples were replaced with clean substitutes.

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McLaren’s proofs included a huge cache of email correspondence and other documentation, which has been made available to the public at www.ipevidencedisclosurepackage.net. He used forensic analysis to show telltale microscopic scratches on urine sample bottles, which matched those made in controlled experiments to determine whether it was possible to open the supposedly tamper-proof seals; DNA analysis to reveal many of the Russian samples contained mixtures of urine from more than one person; and chemical analysis to show that many samples had been adulterated in an attempt to make the clean urine match the dirty samples.

There were many remarkable details in McLaren’s presentation and, if some had already been revealed in the first part of his investigation last July, they still seemed striking second time around. Like the way in which the secret service had a special team known as “the magicians”, whose job it was to jemmy the caps off the sample bottles; that a “bank” of urine was kept so that they would have a ready supply of clean samples to use; and the way in which the clean urine would be mixed with water, salt and Nescafe granules to ensure they matched the appearance and consistency of those they replaced.

But the most jarring moment of McLaren’s speech was not to do with any of those details but came in another passage. McLaren said: “The Russian Olympic team corrupted the London Games on an unprecedented scale,” and: “The desire to win medals superseded their collective moral and ethical compass and their Olympic values of fair play.” McLaren himself said that it all “seems like fiction”. But those five words, “Olympic values of fair play”, sounded utterly fantastical, like some little snippet of Disney thinking adrift in the midst of his two-hour long prosecution of international sport.

These would be the “values” propagated by the same International Olympic Committee that decided not to ban Russia from the Rio Games even though the International Association of Athletics Federations had already suspended Russia from all competitions, and the International Paralympic Committee would soon afterwards bar the country from participating in the Paralympics. You can see exactly how precious those “values” are in the short statement the IOC released on Friday about this “fundamental attack on the integrity of the Olympic Games”. It contained no condemnation, no contrition, no apology, only 300 words of waffle about the assorted commissions it has set up to “prepare appropriate sanctions and measures”. The IOC’s behaviour has been most notable for its vacillation and procrastination.

McLaren stubbornly refused to comment on these or any other issues that he felt were outside his purview but he did allow himself to make one small plea. “Over the past few months, we have seen infighting between the many different factions within international federations and among the anti-doping world,” he said. “I find it difficult to understand why we are not all on the same team. We should all be working together to end doping in sports.”

The World Anti-Doping Agency and the IOC have seemed more interested in squabbling with each other than they have in trying to provide leadership for the athletes and fans. In the absence of that leadership, Russian authorities have been busily trying to undermine McLaren’s findings by pushing the idea that they are the victims here – and even before McLaren had finished addressing the press, Russian politicians and administrators were speaking out against him.

Igor Lebedev, an MP with the far-right Liberal Democratic party, said: “All this only shows that they have no facts and no evidence.” Lebedev ended with a bizarre appeal to Donald Trump to “put an end to this”. Vitaly Smirnov, head of Russia’s new independent anti‑doping commission, insisted that “there has never been an organised system in Russia for the falsification” of samples.

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The hacking group Fancy Bears also tried to confuse the issue by losing it in a fog of moral equivalence. It exposed the therapeutic use exemptions used by many western athletes, as if to say that Russia’s offences were only one of many shades of grey.

And it is true that, as former sports minister Vitaly Mutko put it: “This is not a Russian problem, it is a problem of world athletics.” Doping goes on in the UK, in the US and elsewhere around the world. But you should not get lost worrying about hypocrisy when the truth is that Russia has been caught running a systematic, state-orchestrated sports doping programme.

McLaren hopes a “cultural change” is under way in Russia but says it will take “longer than a few months or even a year” to come about. Which sounds optimistic, even naive. He argues that many of the officials involved have been moved on. Which is true. Mutko himself has since been promoted to deputy prime minister.

But despite that, McLaren’s words do suggest that there is, at least, some hope. More, for sure, than anyone should feel for the prospect of the IOC taking similar steps to reform itself. Its failings allowed this to happen, and after its behaviour in the past year, its “values” and its talk of a “zero-tolerance” approach to doping, rings as empty and insincere as any of those Russian denials.