The ‘fix’ is in but is it right that Russia will compete in the Winter Olympics? | Sean Ingle

Despite calls from UK and US anti-doping bodies for shamed nation to be banned from February’s games, IOC and Wada inaction could let them off the hook

‘It wouldn’t surprise me if the fix is already in,” warned Travis Tygart, the venerable head of the US Anti-Doping Agency, when I asked him on Thursday whether Russia will compete at the 2018 Winter Olympics. It was not so much pessimism as prophecy. Twenty-four hours later Alexander Zhukov, the head of the Russian Olympic Committee, confidently predicted at the 131st IOC summit in Lima: “It will be a Russian team with the Russian anthem and Russian flag” in Pyeongchang.

Of course it will be. No one who follows the arcane politics of the International Olympic Committee believes otherwise. The fix is indeed in, just as it was before the Rio Olympics, when the IOC niftily side-stepped massive evidence of state-sponsored doping and allowed hundreds of Russians to compete, and again in what is now claimed to have been corrupted bidding processes for the Rio and Tokyo Games, in 2009 and 2013, when votes were allegedly traded for cash.

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