Vladimir Putin won’t lose wink of sleep if Russia thrown out of Olympics

I saw Vladimir Putin once. Well, I saw people who could see him, which is considered just a couple of steps down from oligarch in the Russian caste. It was in Sochi during the 2014 Winter Olympics and the Big V was making a carefully choreographed impromptu visit to USA House in the Olympic Park. It was the sort of photo-op where the bayonets and cattle-prods are just out of shot – forced smiles and half-baked chit-chat to beat the band.

Standing at a remove of about a quarter mile or so, the gathered hackery killed time speculating what the point of the visit was. Obviously Putin slugging Budweiser and scoffing brownies with both the head of Team USA and the president of NBC Olympics was designed to distract from something, but what?

In our naivety, we guessed that maybe it was the ludicrously good weather. It was hotter in Sochi that day than it had been in London 18 months earlier on the day Usain Bolt won the 100m. There were queues 20 minutes long in the media centre for sunscreen. But in a world where pics of Putin accepting Happy Valentine’s Day pins from shiny-toothed smiling Yanks graced every front page across the globe the next day, who could think a bit of good weather was anyway odd?

As ever, you could build a new Wikipedia on the square footage of what we didn’t know at the time. Forget the sun, the Russians were running what amounted to a sort of Willie Wonka’s Doping Factory inside the official testing site.

The biggest sporting event in the world for that fortnight with the most amount of eyes on it and they were beating the system through nothing more sophisticated than an intelligence officer agent passing bottles of pre-prepared wee through holes in the floor.

Also, as we found out shortly after landing back home once the games ended, Russia were gearing up for a friendly bit of land-grabbing in Crimea 10 days later. So there was that, too.

You never get more than thumbnail deep in any of these countries when you visit for sport. That goes double when it’s an Olympics, which is essentially a five-ringed city of its own grafted onto whatever was there before it. Currency aside, Beijing, London and Sochi were pretty much indistinguishable from each other most of the time.

But the one thing that screamed loudest from the fortnight in Sochi was that Russians do not care in the slightest what the outside world thinks of them. They know who they think they are and they will happily go their whole life without giving a second’s thought to who you think that might be.

Most of the country is dirt poor. I asked the barman in the hotel one night whether he liked the Olympics and he nodded delightedly. “Yes, because it means we have water and electricity every day. When Olympics go, we only have 10 hours every day.”

Yet he loved Putin. At the mention of his name, he smiled and flexed his biceps. “Putin – strong, strong,” he said. The sort of thing we in the west use now only as a phone emoji and mostly ironically, my man did in real life behind his bar and meant every bit of it.

So here’s the thing. Throw Russian athletes out of the Olympics by all means but we shouldn’t imagine it will change their behaviour. The IAAF’s call on Friday to uphold their suspension was the only course of action they could reasonably go with. And despite the assumption that the IOC would provide the Russians with some wiggle room over the weekend, the fact that people were surprised they backed up the athletics body only goes to show how little they think of the organisation that runs the Olympics.

It has to be done and it should be done. Yet at the same time, it’s no stretch to imagine Putin smiling widely at the thought of a little ostracising on the world stage. It was obvious in the way he luxuriated in the finger-wagging coming out of France over a couple of hundred Russian hooligans during the week, openly giggling in parliament at the thought of 200 Russians scaring the daylights out of a thousand English.

Putin – strong, strong. Does anyone think it will cost him a thought if the Olympics go ahead without Russia? Does anyone imagine it damages him or the state in the slightest among the Russian people? Is the hope that Russia gets rattled by missing an Olympics or two and mend their ways on the hope that the rest of the world will look kindly upon them. If so, please take the stairway on the left and find some sky in which to try to locate your pie.

The IAAF and the IOC ignored doping for way too long. The energy they put into hiding it was matched only by their efforts to hide from it. This is the outcome – a problem so intractable that it doesn’t matter whether they do the right thing or the wrong thing. No possible result will be satisfactory.

Sow, reap.