It appears delicate sensibilities have been hurt in South Korea, and by someone sporting the Maple Leaf, no less.
An unidentified Canadian Olympic team official, possibly a coach, although no one seems quite sure, may or may not have said some unfriendly things about doping to a Russian counterpart in a cafeteria at the just-opened Pyeongchang Winter Games.
Or so claims a representative of the Olympic Athletes from Russia, which is definitely not the same as the Russian Olympic team, despite its members having arrived carrying suitcases with the word "RUSSIA" stamped on them.
Anyway, our country's delegation offered an apology of sorts, which was awfully Canadian of them but completely unnecessary. Anger is the proper human response to the farce the International Olympic Committee and Russia are perpetrating in Pyeongchang.
No country is perfect. Unethical performance enhancement exists in the highest reaches of sports, including in Canada. But Russia presents a different case.
Thanks to whistleblower testimony and documentary evidence, the world knows that Russia built a sprawling state-sponsored doping program that was in place for years. At the Sochi Winter Games in 2014, it involved a cloak-and-dagger operation to tamper with urine samples.
Longtime IOC member and World Anti-Doping Agency founding president Richard Pound – another troublemaking Canuck – was the first to raise the issue this week.
His uncompromising words at a pre-Games IOC session may have raised hackles, but he was right to denounce the corrosive taint of Russian participation in Pyeongchang.
The nominal ban on Russia's athletes, sports federation officials and coaches has been exposed as a Potemkin-like charade. The OAR team counts 170 members, a number that could grow. Dozens of them are known dopers, and several of them had their 2014 medals stripped.
Amateur athletes and the teams who support them spend years preparing for their moment on the Olympic stage.
They are right to be angry at having to share it with cheats, and they shouldn't feel the least bit badly about expressing it bluntly.