The next step in an extraordinary move to oust an entire country from the Olympics will take place Monday morning in Toronto.
At a news conference in a downtown hotel, Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren will release the results of his investigation into allegations that the Russian government undertook a systemic effort to cover up a state-sponsored doping program at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi.
McLaren's work was commissioned by WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency.
It follows on charges made by Grigory Rodchenkov, a laboratory director in Sochi. Rodchenkov told the New York Times that he was ordered to replace tainted urine samples provided by top Russian competitors with clean ones.
None of them tested positive at the time, and more than a dozen won medals.
The details of the alleged plot play like something from a John le Carré novel – a shadow lab built alongside a genuine one; Russian security operatives devising a way to tamper with tamper-proof vials; samples moving back and forth through a small hole in the wall during dead of night; Rodchenkov fired and fleeing to the United States in fear of his life; two senior colleagues who remained behind turning up dead in curious circumstances.
If McLaren confirms the bulk of this, the question switches immediately from 'Who's to blame?' to 'What's to be done?' This is happening less than three weeks from the opening ceremonies in Rio de Janeiro.
The Russian track team has already been banned after a similar pattern of organized cheating was uncovered.
With a second such accusation in the offing, officials representing the conscience of the wider sporting world are preparing a nuclear option.
"If the evidence [of the McLaren report] is clear, concise, irrefutable and describes state-sponsored doping in Russian sport, we will call on the IOC to ban the Russian Olympic Committee in Rio," Paul Melia, head of the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, said on Sunday.
Melia said the CCES's position is shared by "more than 10" national anti-doping agencies.
It's easy to understand their point. If your professional raison d'être was keeping amateur sport clean – an effort that must occasionally feel like trying to stand upright underneath a waterfall – it's difficult to imagine a more outrageous scenario.
On a sporting level, Russia's alleged crimes deserve the harshest possible punishment. But the Olympics are about a great deal more than sport.
In its rush to brand and monetize every aspect of the Olympic experience, the IOC's core mission has been obscured and occasionally muddled, but not lost. The real point of a Games isn't getting a bunch of very fit people out on a field to see who can run fastest or jump highest. That happens on a regular basis at track meets, in swim trials and on ski hills around the world.
The point is getting nations who hate one another's guts to enthusiastically share a global stage in the spirit of kinship. It's about bringing people – all of them – together in one place. The Olympics are unique in many ways, not least of which is that it doesn't really matter how good you are. It's the last great event that truly celebrates the virtue of participation. That's one of the ironies of Russia's offences.
At its best, sport is the foundation of mutual understanding between opposed nations and cultures. It's a way forward. The Olympics is our most perfect realization of that goal.
Which is not to say that it's perfect. Or anywhere close.
But its hallmark is blanket inclusivity. Even representatives of the world's most despicable regimes have been warmly received at the Games.
The rationale is that there is no blame to be apportioned for where you were born, and that there is no sense in arbitrarily deciding who is worthy of membership in the world community. If you prove able to compete, everyone's welcome.
It's debatable whether they leave any better, or whether they alter their behaviour after having mingled with the rest, but that's the hope. In a world swathed over every inch of its surface by cynicism, the Olympic Games are a small patch of idealism.
They've banned countries before. Some of those choices – ejecting the Central Powers after the First World War, Germany and Japan after the Second World War, South Africa during apartheid, Rhodesia in the 1970s – now seem more fair-minded than others. All are, to one degree or another, cherry picking not necessarily what is right, but what is most unpopularly wrong.
The IOC hasn't done it in more than a quarter-century. Excluding Russia reintroduces a bad idea into the mix.
'But they are being thrown out specifically for crimes of sport,' some would quite reasonably say. There are rules, and Russia has apparently broken them (though none specifically referencing the concept of a state-level actor in doping).
The counter to which would be, 'What about the next time?' Having taken the step, what pressure could be exerted in the future to keep out autocratic countries, or countries that beat up on their neighbours, or those that defy human-rights conventions?
In a world so much more connected and activist than it was even a decade ago, it will be awfully difficult to tell people, "Sure, Country X invaded Country Y and killed a whole bunch of innocent people, but it's not like they played silly buggers with the pee bottles. That's our line in the sand."
Once you take this measure, you inject something into the Olympic calculation that the movement has attempted to bulwark itself against – politics.
Ban for life all Russian athletes who've been caught. Pull their medals. Put everyone else under a new, stricter testing regime. Refuse that country the right to hold a Games. Maybe they'll leave of their own accord, which would be fine.
But don't start down the path of dividing the good from the bad. Or, at least, our own version of which is which.
Once you've set off in that direction, there may be no returning to what the Olympics were founded for in the first place.
Cathal Kelly