If you’re an avid sports fan like I am, you may have heard the shocking news that has come up involving the 2018 Winter Olympics that will be taking place in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Russia has been banned from the Olympics altogether for recent investigations that have shown a state wide sponsored doping scheme. For those of you who don’t know about this or what doping is, it is when an athlete takes to enhance certain skills such as muscle mass, or endurance.

Really, anything that gives the athlete an unfair advantage to the competition is considered doping. As you can tell from Russia’s punishment that it is a very serious charge and something that has cost Russia greatly. With this ban, it prohibits any Russian officials to make an appearance at the games, this includes President Vladimir Putin. It prevents the Russian flag being flown or shown anywhere and any athletes that were able to prove that they were not a part of the doping scandal are allowed to compete under a neutral flag.

This means that athletes cannot compete for Russia and if an athlete wins a gold medal they will not sound the Russian national anthem as it is a usual Olympic tradition to do so. This is incredibly demeaning for Russia, as history shows it is a typical superpower during the Winter Games. A charge like this destroys the integrity of the past Olympic teams from previous years for Russia.

Many speculated that the Russian government may boycott the games altogether and forbid any athletes from competing. However, just announced today by Vladimir Putin that they are going to allow any athlete eligible for the games to compete.

This all began when a Russian man by the name of Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov defected from Russia in 2016 to expose one of the biggest sport's scandal that the world had seen for a very long time. Dr. Rodchenkov exposed a state-sponsored doping scheme that had helped the Russian team greatly during the 2014 Winter Olympics that ironically took place in Sochi, Russia.

Dr. Rodchenkov was the head of the Russian anti-doping laboratory who exposed the government’s involvement in tampering with hundreds of drugs samples to hide any wrongdoing from athletes and give all Russian athletes a tremendous advantage over the competition. This took much bravery as now many people have been saying Dr. Rodchenkov and his family will have to live the rest of their lives looking over their shoulders after exposing such a massive scandal that resulted in a very harsh but deserving punishment to Russia’s Olympic committee.

If you want more information about Dr. Rodchenkov’s story I suggest you watch the Netflix documentary “Icarus” that goes further in depth of not only the doctor’s story but the entire scandal as well.

This just makes you wonder how long Russian athletes have been doing this and makes you feel truly disgusted by the though of this. Olympic athletes spend their entire lives training to have the honor of representing their country in the games. They achieve this goal by hard work, dedication to the sport, and doing it the right way. Not cheating their way through and using deception to hide this awful scandal.

I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling utterly disgusted by this as many athletes would do anything to be an Olympic athlete, and then you have athletes that were involved in the scandal, cheating their way through life. Thankfully this was stopped and Russia was dealt with a very well-deserved punishment.

Hopefully this will put a stop to any planned future doping schemes, and we can again focus on enjoying watching athletes compete fairly. The only athletes that deserve the honor of being an Olympian are the ones that do the right way. The Winter Olympics being on February 9^th, 2018.

Sources: Waldron , Travis. “HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 5 Dec. 2017, www.huffingtonpost.com/.