On Friday, a potential watershed moment in sport and anti-doping occurred in Vienna, Austria. The International Association of Athletics Federations decided to keep in place a ban on Russian athletes. This means the nation that won the second-most medals at the London Games will not have a single participant in track and field in Rio. That is, they won't be competing under the Russian flag.The IAAF created a back-door clause that will allow Russian athletes to motivate inclusion in Rio as neutrals . The athlete must "clearly and convincingly" show they are not tainted by the corrupt Russian system. This means that any athlete who is based in Russia will be excluded, because their anti-doping system has been shown to be untrustworthy.The IAAF introduced the clause on the advice of lawyers to rebut likely legal challenges. Those challenges will begin next week, when the International Olympic Committee meets in Lausanne, Switzerland.But early signs are that the IOC will reinforce the IAAF's decision. It welcomed and supported the decision, and affirmed the IAAF's control over its sport.That's a surprise because Thomas Bach, the IOC president, is collegial with President Vladimir Putin, which is partly why many expected a soft approach to the Russian ban, rather than the relative hardball we got on Friday.I suspect that the IOC, like the IAAF, has been given no choice but to adopt this position because, every month this year new revelations of Russian corruption have emerged. These include bribery, collusion with athletes, burying positive tests and deliberate non-existent testing.Many of these have emerged since the ban was imposed and any chances Russia might have had of convincing authorities that it had turned a corner vanished faster than the tainted urine samples of many a Russian athlete.The scale of that corruption won't stop the individual appeals, however. The next few weeks may see dozens, if not hundreds, of appeals made to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, as Russian athletes seek legal recourse.You'd certainly hate to be a clean athlete in Russia. Aside from the fact that you'd be in a minority, you're also now facing the prospect of missing out on the Olympic Games in Brazil because of the criminal acts of fellow athletes and officials.But that's why this decision is so significant - it's been a long time coming. Part of the solution to anti-doping may be to punish the "collective" rather than the failed historical focus on the athlete.The Russian Ministry of Sport honed in on this apparent unfairness in its immediate response to Friday's decision, decrying the fact that the dreams of clean athletes were being destroyed because of corrupt officials and cheaters.While I think this was the right decision , I also despair a little at how simplistically many have responded to Russia's ban. I have heard athletes saying how relieved they are to be competing with the knowledge that they don't have to face cheats. As though all the world's dopers reside in Russia, with none anywhere else.As much as banning Russia removes a contingent of dopers, doping is a global problem. Russia's doping is state-sponsored on an unprecedented scale, but any athlete who thinks they're racing a clean field just because nobody's surname ends in "ova" is as delusional as Russia's doping-deniers...