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Article snippet: MOSCOW — Russia, which has long burnished athletic prowess as a symbol of its great-power status, faced its largest international sporting crisis since the Soviet era on Tuesday when the International Olympic Committee banned the country from competing in the 2018 Winter Games. In a country that is a winter sports powerhouse, one covered by snow much of the year, the ban pitted the desire of ordinary Russians to cheer on their champion skaters, biathletes and hockey players against calls to boycott the games to show that an Olympics without Russia is no Olympics at all. Beyond sports, the decision carried the whiff of history, when Olympic playing fields were an extension of Cold War battlefields. Back then, to be sure, the sources of conflict were rooted in political ideology, not in performance-enhancing drugs. A number of senior Russian politicians and sporting officials demanded that Russia avoid the Winter Games in South Korea entirely, while others thought individual competitors should make the decision. The ban left open the door for athletes to compete as individuals, under the Olympic flag. “The question now is to participate using this status, or not,” Aleksei Durnovo, a sports commentator on the Echo of Moscow radio station, said in an interview. “Some people think it’s humiliation to participate like this, others that we should, to allow the athletes an opportunity to compete.” In Switzerland, Alexander Zhukov, the president of the Russian Olympic Com... Link to the full article to read more