This is what happened. Russia was found to have streamlined the art of cheating. Officials including the country’s secret police put holes in walls to pass dirty samples into a room where they were exchanged.

Officials learned how to remove the ‘tamper proof’ caps on the urine collection jars, switched positive samples for clean specimens and allowed their athletes to illegally use banned substances right up to the time that they were performing.

There was no need for athletes to use masking agents or flush the drugs from their systems. They simply moved the nasty containers through the holes into secret rooms and replaced them.

In other simple administrative manoeuvres lab technicians marked down positive samples as negative. Russia also moved their athletes into military zones or places where it was considered dangerous for civilians to travel. So testers either did not go or were not permitted by the military to enter a zone.

All of it was unethical and a systematic violation of athletes’ rights and international doping rules.

The Russian athletics federation was then suspended by the IAAF. The Russians appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas), which upheld the IAAF’s ruling.

Like any court, the Cas did not have to agree with what was unfolding, but upheld regulations. Because the Russian federation was suspended, under the IAAF rules they were not entitled to nominate Russian athletes for the Rio Games.

That ruling allowed for the prosecution of innocent athletes, athletes who may not have cheated under the abusive doping regime.

In addition, athletes who had been previously banned because of illegal doping were also caught up in the trawl.

Chaotic

In a chaotic unfolding of events, clean Russian athletes, because they had tested positive in past years, were banned from going to Rio, while athletes from every other country in the world who had tested positive in the past were allowed to participate.

Setting aside the opprobrium and anger at the damage Russia had caused to the image of sport, it has raised an issue of natural justice and principles of jurisprudence, which appear to have been set aside.

If justice is the process or result of using laws to fairly judge and punish crimes and criminals, then it has, in this instance, been overlooked in the rush to make an example of Russia and collectively punish all of the athletes.

Justin ‘the time has been served’ Gatlin, who has been banned twice for doping, will probably contest the 100m final.

The key whistleblower, Yuliya Stepanova, who blew open the entire cheating scam in Russia and was also previously twice banned, has been prevented from competing.

Blunt instrument

Using this blunt instrument, the IAAF and other sports federations have ensured 118 competitors of the 389-strong Russian team have been stopped from taking part in the Olympics.

Not only have able-bodied athletes been banned, but 267 Russian athletes across 18 sports who were due to take part in the Paralympics have also been stopped from competing.

There is a widespread belief this will help clean up Russian sport despite a recent poll conducted by the independent Levada Centre, which found 71 per cent of Russians doubt authorities were involved in any doping cover-ups. That lack of contrition suggests there has been little cultural shift.

Critically many in Russia perceive the ban as politics invading sport and that somehow Russia is being punished for its assertive foreign policy that includes the annexation of Crimea and support for the brutal Assad government in Syria.

More likely it is because the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) is shamefully short of funding and cannot police world sport in an effective way.

A commonly agreed number of between 10 and 15 per cent of athletes are doping at any given time across the world. A commonly agreed number for catching them is one to two per cent.

That said, rarely if ever has a Champions League soccer player been caught and at last year’s Rugby World Cup there were zero positive doping results.

Wada are incapable of doing the job they were set up to do. In its near 17-year existence, it can lay claim to considerable achievements. But a more realistic way to judge the body would be to conclude that doping in sport has not been eradicated; rather the incidence of cheating seems to have increased in this time.

A decade ago, Wada received €18 million in annual funding. Last year, it received just over €23 million, which given inflation is hardly an increase commensurate with the problem and nothing like the increase in sponsorship revenues of the IOC in that period.

Given the amount of money in sport in general, €23 million is a pittance, especially for an organisation with as wide and critical a function as Wada.

The run-in to the Olympic Games was rife with anti-Russian feeling and the booing of the swimmer Yuliya Efimova – who faced two bans for performance-enhancing drugs before eventually being allowed to swim in Rio earlier this week – was a public expression of the mood music.

Smattering of boos

As the Russian athletes stepped into Maracanã Stadium at the Opening Ceremony in their bowties and white piped blazers, they too were met with a smattering of boos among the applause.

The International Paralympic movement recently said the real tragedy was “not about athletes cheating a system, but about a state-run system that is cheating the athletes”.

The blanket ban, which has punished clean athletes, compounds that sentiment.

It was a panicked and confused cop-out where innocent Russian people paid the price for a world that, pious hand-wringing aside, doesn’t really care about doping or justice.