The decision to ban the Russian track and field team from the summer Olympic Games in Brazil is excellent, and it hopefully marks a new era in the fight to stop all the cheating in international sports. The International Olympic Committee now has the opportunity to uphold or reject the decision; it should find the courage to maintain it.
Russia is protesting vociferously, but it has been caught red-handed. Its track-and-field athletes were suspended from competition in November by the IAAF, the body that oversees international track, because of a report by the World Anti-Doping Agency that accused Russia of orchestrating a state-sanctioned doping program.
Since then, the former director of Russia's anti-doping laboratory has fled the country and admitted he took part in a team-wide doping scheme during the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi. This is treachery on a Cold War level, and the IAAF has justifiably had enough. It announced Russia's Olympic exile on Friday.
The ban is the strongest message ever sent by an international sporting association that cheating will not be tolerated the way it once was. The IAAF has ignored Russia's claims that it has cleaned up its act since its track and field athletes were first suspended, and for good reason: There is no way those claims can be trusted, not at this point anyway. Allowing Russian runners and jumpers to compete in the Summer Games would not be a credible or adequate response to the breadth of the allegations against the country's sporting apparatus.
The Russian sports ministry is now pleading for redemption. "We appeal to the members of the International Olympic Committee to not only consider the impact that our athletes' exclusion will have on their dreams and the people of Russia, but also that the Olympics themselves will be diminished by their absence."
The loss of the Russian team will definitely have a negative impact on the Games and will no doubt crush the dreams of any Russian track athletes who didn't take part in the state-orchestrated cheating. But all of that is on the Russians. They have no one to blame but themselves.
Let's hope this new toughness will be precedent-setting in international sports. Cheaters should be banned, and so should their enablers, especially if that enabler is a state government.