COLLECTIVE punishment or individual justice? As the International Olympic Committee (IOC) wrestles with the fall-out from the latest revelations relating to state-sponsored drug taking in Russian sport, the key dilemma is whether potentially-clean athletes should be punished for the wrongs that were going on around them.

If Russia is issued with a blanket ban, preventing all of its citizens from competing at next month’s Rio Olympics, there is the very real possibility that some honest, diligent sportsmen and women will have their Olympic dream ripped away after years, perhaps decades, of preparation.

That is unfortunate, but it is a necessary ill. The depth, scale and sheer brazen audacity of the corruption that was uncovered in Canadian law professor Richard McLaren’s report for the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) demands an unprecedented response.

To allow Russian competitors to line up in Rio would be to effectively admit defeat in the face of Russian geo-political manoeuvring. It would be like facing up to the playground bully, only to run for cover as soon as they started flexing their muscles.

If the fight for clean sport is to mean anything at all, Russia has to be banned from all Olympic and Paralympic disciplines, both in Rio and at the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang.

The overseeing of all Russian sporting bodies should be placed in the hands of an independent organisation, funded by the Russian state but clearly removed from any potential for political interference, and independent, unannounced spot checks of Russia’s sporting infrastructure should be regular occurrences throughout the next Olympic cycle. Only then should consideration be given to readmitting Russia for the Tokyo Games in 2020.

Legal challenges would no doubt ensue, and the IOC would potentially be hit with some eye-watering compensation claims.

However, this morning’s decision by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) to uphold the International Association of Athletics Federations’ (IAAF) banning of all track-and-field competitors from the Rio Games has effectively set a precedent, and as the most prominent sporting organisation in the world, the IOC has to be prepared to make a stand. Otherwise, as technology continues to advance, other states will feel emboldened to emulate Russia’s endemic cheating.

‘Endemic’ is the right word for a state-run doping system that resulted in at least 312 out of 577 failed tests between 2012 and 2015 being covered up. The scandal was most pronounced during the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, where ‘dirty’ samples were routinely swapped for clean urine at the Russian Anti-Doping Agency’s laboratories.

The McLaren report states that “the Ministry of Sport directed, controlled and oversaw the manipulation of athletes’ analytical results or sample swapping, with the active participation and assistance of the FSB (state security service), CSP (anti-doping agency), and both Moscow and Sochi Laboratories.”

In other words, this wasn’t just a couple of rogue athletes trying to improve their own performances, or even a single sport’s governing body raging out of control. This was co-ordinated corruption that must have been sanctioned from the very top of the Russian state, if not by president Vladimir Putin himself, then certainly by some of the most senior officials in the sporting system.

Two, Yuri Nagornykh, the deputy sports minister, and Natalia Zhelanova, his anti-doping advisor, have been suspended. Their boss however, sports minister Vitaly Mutko, remains in his position, and has stated that he expects his subordinates to be reinstated once an investigation has taken place. Mutko sits on FIFA’s governing body, and is the head of Russia’s organising committee for the 2018 World Cup.

Can anyone be certain that tournament will be untainted? On the evidence of events in Sochi two years ago, it is extremely unlikely, and the question of why Russia felt compelled to sanction such wide-scale drug taking at a supposedly flagship event gets to the heart of why the IOC must adopt a powerful stance ahead of Rio.

George Orwell famously described sport as “war minus the shooting”, and in an era where militaristic displays of aggression are increasingly hard to enact – although perhaps not in the case of Russia, given what has been happening in Syria and Eastern Ukraine – it should not be too much of a surprise to see sport prioritised when it comes to nationalistic posturing.

We have been here before of course, most notably in the 1980s when East Germany’s state-run drugs programme enabled the country’s Communist rulers to use the Olympic medal table as a measure of national well-being, and the current Russian elite is merely repeating a tactic that was prevalent in the era of the USSR.

With Russia’s economy nose-diving - more than three million of the country’s citizens are estimated to live below the poverty line – and Putin’s foreign policy having alienated most overseas powers, sporting prestige and influence represent a rare opportunity to build a Russian success story and pen the narrative of an enduring superpower.

Staging major sporting events is the first part of that process, hence the billions that were spent on securing the Sochi Winter Olympics and 2018 World Cup, with claims of corruption and impropriety being swiftly swept under the carpet. How convenient that the officials behind the 2018 bid somehow managed to ‘lose’ computer evidence once claims of potential corruption surfaced.

Putin revelled in being the man that brought such world-renowned events to Russia, but the Russian elite couldn’t stomach the idea of having to watch Russian competitors embarrass themselves while the rest of the world claimed medal after medal.

Hence the rush to pump so many of their leading competitors full of drugs, and the necessity to construct an elaborately-named ‘disappearing positive methodology’ process to ensure any subsequent positive tests did not come to light.

The McLaren report claims urine samples were manipulated across the “vast majority” of summer and winter Olympic sports from the end of 2011 to the middle of 2015. Nothing was to be left to chance, and while the edifice that facilitated the cheating has now crumbled, it is naïve to assume the effects of such long-term drug taking will subsequently have disappeared.

There will almost certainly be Russian athletes out there with the effects of years of drug taking in their system, and the integrity of the Rio Games will be shot to pieces if even one of them is allowed to compete alongside clean competitors next month.