These repeated cases have even been able to go back to the highest peak of the state, which earned Russia in 2020 a two-year exclusion from major international competitions.

If Russian athletes who have never been convicted of doping can compete in the Beijing Olympics, as they were able to do in Tokyo this summer, they do so under a neutral banner and the flag and the country's anthem are neither shown nor play.

Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, are banned from attending competitions unless they are invited, as was the case on February 4 for the opening ceremony of the Games by Chinese leaders.

On an unprecedented scale in sports history, the Russian scandal has been going on since 2010 and involves the secret services and the Ministry of Sports.

It has fueled tensions between Moscow and sports bodies, described by the Russians as instruments of Western anti-Russian policy.

The Kremlin has always denied the existence of a state doping system, while Mr. Putin had placed sport at the heart of Russian prestige policy.

Whistleblowers

It began in 2014 when Russian middle-distance runner Yuliya Stepanova and her husband Vitali, ex-controller of the Russian anti-doping agency (Rusada), alerted the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to institutionalized doping in Russia.

The couple had turned to the German channel ARD, which had broadcast from December 2014 a series of damning documentaries.

Following these revelations, WADA denounced in 2015 cases of doping in Russian athletics which "could not have existed" without the consent of the government, suspending Rusada.

The scandal turned into a spy novel when Grigori Rodchenkov, forced to resign from the Moscow laboratory he directed and took refuge in the United States, confessed in the spring of 2016 to having orchestrated for years the concealment of Russian doping in coordination with the Ministry of Sports.

According to WADA, this "State doping system" involved 30 sports between 2011 and 2015 and involved the Russian secret services (FSB), which during the 2014 Sochi Olympics replaced samples of athletes doped with "clean" samples stored beforehand.

Despite Russian denials, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) then suspended the Russian Olympic Committee and banned for life from the Olympic Games around forty athletes and the former Minister of Sports Vitali Mutko, sanctions then reduced by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (TAS).

The scandal seemed to be coming to an end in September 2018, when WADA lifted Rusada's suspension on the condition that he could access the database of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory.

But a year later, the Agency announced that the data from the former Moscow laboratory transmitted to its investigators had been falsified.

As a result, in December 2019, the AMA excluded Russia from the Olympic Games for four years in order to punish Moscow for having repeated cheating, penalties reduced by half by the CAS.

© 2022 AFP