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editorial

An oft-voiced suspicion about Olympic athletes and doping is, "They all do it." But rarely does a country gratify the skeptics with objective evidence.

A shout out, then, to the not-Russian Olympic team, which has returned a positive drug test courtesy of Alexander Krushelnytsky, a bronze medalist in, of all things, the sport of mixed curling.

When doping scandals engulf curling, a pursuit where the absence of peak physical fitness presents no barrier to viable medal hopes, it suggests Russia's state-sponsored program is still kicking and does not, in fact, know any bounds. They really are willing to cheat at anything.

None of which is to say they are the only ones (they're not), or that curling isn't a sport (it emphatically is).

Besides, Mr. Krushelnytsky's positive result for meldonium, a banned heart medication that inhibits stress and has tripped up so many Russian athletes at international competitions as to become cliché, isn't really a story about curling. It is about the International Olympic Committee's willful blindness in dealing with Russia's misbehaviour.

When the IOC allowed nearly 200 allegedly "clean" athletes, including Mr. Krushelnytsky, to compete in South Korea under the fig-leaf designation Olympic Athletes from Russia, it ran the risk of suffering international embarrassment and ridicule.

It has now officially earned both.

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