So Mr Bach, will nothing ever be enough to ban Russia from the Olympics?

P icture the mise-en-scène in Paris next year, on the opening day of the Olympics. At the final of the 10m air rifle shooting mixed team event, the Russian Sergey Kamenskiy presses his eye to his gun, squeezes the trigger, and – a millisecond later – is triumphantly celebrating gold. Meanwhile 1,500 miles away in Kyiv, rubble from homes and hospitals continues to pile up, along with the bodies of the dead.

Far fetched? Hardly. The International Olympic Committee is determined to establish a pathway for Russians to compete in Paris. And it won’t be deterred by widespread condemnation from Ukrainian athletes, or the expectation that 35 countries – including the UK and United States – will call for a ban this week. Instead on Sunday the IOC president, Thomas Bach, doubled down by denying his organisation was on the wrong side of history.

Let us indulge the IOC’s position for a moment. Its core argument is that no athlete should be punished for their passport, or the sins of their country. Do that, and where do you stop? By barring the US team from the 2004 Games for the invasion of Iraq? Armenia and Azerbaijan for the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict? Israel for its occupation of Palestine?

Notably it also has the United Nations on its side. In a recent letter to Ukraine’s minister of sport, Bach noted approvingly that two UN special rapporteurs had expressed “serious concern” that banning Russian and Belarusian athletes would be discriminatory. One of them, Alexandra Xanthaki, denied being pro-Russia on Twitter last week, adding: “Soooooo, the US waged an illegal war in 2003. I don’t remember people trying to ban Michael Phelps from swimming.”

However, what is also striking in the letter is Bach’s anger. Not towards Russia, as