On Monday (June 20) I arrived at a rainswept Lord’s cricket ground in north-west London to find, to my surprise, that the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA)’s communications director was sporting an MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) tie and, to my utter astonishment, that the top brass were treating Russian President Vladimir Putin and his cohorts to a dose of the short stuff.

The message I squelched away with was that if Richard McLaren’s pre-Rio 2016 report found evidence of state-supported doping in Russia beyond athletics, a tough line would be called for that could lead to large-scale, if not almost total, Russian absences from the Olympics.

While this appeared to go down well with other media, and while I can understand it if WADA is fed up with being everyone’s whipping boy for its perceived ineffectiveness and lack of bite, its stance surprised me for the following reasons:

1. It was out of character for a body which has so many stakeholders as to make it almost inevitable it will often sound mealy-mouthed.

2. It was out of kilter with the West’s approach to Putin over the 17 years or so since he emerged from Boris Yeltsin’s jowly shadow.

By and large, though it pays domestic political dividends for both sides to growl at each other from time to time, we have followed a strategy of appeasement.

This has been underpinned, or so it seems to me, by Russia’s importance to the West in three critical areas: a) energy supplies; b) confronting violent Islamism; c) nuclear non-proliferation.

If that is the big picture, what sense would it make for little old sport - which has bought into Putin’s nation rebuilding project to, you might say, an excessive degree in recent times - now to turn turtle, unless as part of an overall recalibration of the West’s Russia policy?

Next day, sure enough, following an enigmatic response by a Putin official to a question mentioning the dreaded B-word (boycott), we were back on more familiar ground.

A declaration released after the latest Olympic “Summit”, attended by many sports big cheeses - including Russian Olympic Committee President Alexander Zhukov - appeared designed to put the most favourable possible slant on the troublesome Russian situation pre-Rio.

For one thing, while “fully” respecting the recent decision of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) to extend its suspension of Russian track and field athletes, the summiteers felt moved to add their appreciation of the IAAF’s acknowledgement of the “enormous efforts and professionalism of …the Russian Olympic Committee”, which had led to “significant progress towards satisfaction of the verification criteria to date”.

More importantly, the summiteers moved to assert their control over which Russian competitors do ultimately pitch up in Rio, calling on each international sport federation (IF) to decide on the eligibility of Russian (and Kenyan) athletes “on an individual basis”.

This appears to rule out a blanket ban no matter how grim - or otherwise - McLaren’s conclusions turn out to be.

I am not convinced they reached this decision for what I would consider the right reasons; nonetheless, I think this is as it should be.

As I have written before, while I hope not naïve, I am profoundly uncomfortable about banishing from the Games athletes not proven to have committed any doping offence besides being overseen by a seemingly rotten system.

It is bad enough that their presumption of innocence has been airbrushed away; it is also hard to see how any sort of uniformity of process is going to be applied to the myriad decision-making mechanisms that will seemingly now determine which Russian competitors line up in Rio.

But Russian competitors who are not proven to have broken any rule, or who have served their time for past transgressions, must, in my view, be given every possible chance to make their case for inclusion, even if this provokes howls of protest from non-Russian athletes and the western media.

What the findings of the McLaren report ought to determine is whether those Russians who are accepted compete under the Russian, or the Olympic, flag.

It came as little surprise given the tone of the summit declaration, when Zhukov called off the boycott dogs, telling TASS that Russia “will not boycott the Olympics”.

While the politicisation of sport from the second half of the 20th century was probably inevitable given how important a facet of national identity it has become, the seeds of this latest Russia crisis in the Olympic Movement were in some ways sown as long ago as 1951.

This was when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) prioritised the universality of the sports movement by recognising the then USSR National Olympic Committee without insisting that Soviet IOC members be independent figures chosen to represent their own consciences rather than the will of the Kremlin.

Given the make-up of the Cold War world, this instantly handed Moscow considerable influence over Olympic affairs, not only via Konstantin Andrianov, the first Soviet IOC member, but through others who might feel compelled to follow his lead for political reasons.

If there is a silver lining to the present bank of cumulo nimbus stationed leadenly over the sporting movement - as it was all too literally over Lord’s – it is that Putin could not, if push came to shove, command the fealty of a group of client states such as the old-style Eastern Bloc.

Russia’s fast-approaching 2018 FIFA World Cup is a further factor that might exert a moderating influence over the Kremlin’s policy in the field of international sports.

So I fancy the possibility of a St Petersburg Olympics which, however far-fetched it might appear at the moment, still seems the logical culmination of Putin’s nation rebuilding-through-sport strategy.

While it has nothing to do with the points of principle that are in play in the current high-stakes game of brinkmanship, I also think it worth underlining that the cynical approach to sporting success that seems to have been rampant in Russia will almost certainly lead to humiliation for the nation in Rio, however many Russian athletes compete there – and especially if they compete under the Russian flag.

Russian sport is broken at present: if you were not persuaded by the country’s medals tally at last year’s World Athletics Championships of four, perhaps the football team’s 0-3 drubbing at the hands of tiny Wales at Euro 2016 will have convinced you.

Frankly, there could be 200 Russian athletes in Rio and I doubt we would be seeing all that many of them on the medals podium.

Those who did get there, moreover, could expect the sort of hostile reaction from the crowd that is liable to leave an impression on even the most thick-skinned of them.

No, in terms of promulgating real reform in Russia, I suspect more progress has been made this year than we perhaps allow ourselves to imagine.

It will soon be time to re-focus attention, once again, on other targets.