It's hard to bear the sight of Russian Olympic athletes posing for their cynical president, as they did recently at the May 9 parade in Moscow.
If the world were fair, these people wouldn't have had a chance to win their medals.
Because their state's doping and cover-up system was so clumsily constructed that everything came out.
But then Russia was too powerful for its teams to have been excluded from the Olympics for the past six years.
Grace before justice for this merciless system.
Now the young heroes are being harnessed to Putin's war cart as living proof of a fatal Olympic error.
On Sunday it was exactly 42 years ago that German sport, under political pressure, decided to boycott the 1980 Moscow games.
The Cold War hardened the fronts, Ice Age also ruled in sport.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, however, hope arose: would the Olympic Games be able to take place in peace, freedom and fairness – in a shelter beyond politics?
Are you kidding me? Are you serious when you say that.
The great Olympic utopia has failed.