Compromises are never pretty. But the mess that the International Olympic Committee has made with its decision to let Russia's athletes participate in the Rio Games is especially tawdry.
Despite being the supreme body of international sport, and possessing boundless resources thanks to the revenue that flows from broadcasters and advertisers, the IOC decided to sidestep its ultimate responsibility in Rio, namely, making sure the sports that generate all this wealth are fair and clean.
There's a good reason to think the opposite is true, and that cheating has been widespread for years. The worst offenders, far and away, have been the Russians – not just a few dirty athletes, but the entire apparatus of the state sports system, including government ministers, the heads of national sports federations (often important political players in their own right), state security forces, and even supposedly independent drug-testing bodies that were instead tightly integrated into a regime of corruption.
Over the past year-and-a-half, much of this elaborate misbehaviour has finally come to light, first through media reports based on testimony from whistleblowers, and then through damning investigations by the independent World Anti-Doping Agency. Because Russian track and field was seen to be so thoroughly tainted, the sport's governing body acted quickly and banned Russia from Rio. The IOC, despite having much more evidence to go on, backed away from taking decisive action against the entire team, despite insistence from WADA and its own athletes' commission that Russia be excluded.
Instead, the IOC has handed off responsibility to the not entirely reputable sports federations under its control, allowing them to decide within a short deadline which Russian athletes meet their highly uneven doping standards and are worthy of participation, and which do not. Just imagine the scene at the International Judo Federation, whose honorary president is Vladimir Putin.
IOC president Thomas Bach portrays his decision as an attempt to balance collective responsibility with the needs of individual justice. But his rights-based relativism doesn't apply in this context. A system as centralized and dirty as Russia's leaves no one untainted, and every athlete who parades under the Russian flag at Rio has already been compromised.