People love the Olympics, but for how much longer?

So along with the mosquitoes, the water, the crime, the politics, the security, the infrastructure, the animals, the traffic, and on and on and on, there’s a new, not so welcome guest at the table heading into these problematic upcoming Games of Rio: the end of the Olympics.

Or at least, a split in the “Olympic family,” as they grandly call themselves when these reunions happen, with their segregated soirees and facilities (even, and especially the toilets) reserved for the “Olympic movement.” Monday’s McLaren Report set that excision course, confirming in some detail a state-sponsored doping scheme out of Russia that went on for nearly four years and included the hosting of the Sochi Olympics. Where it goes from here once the IOC meets today and will be faced with calls to ban the entire Russian delegation from setting so much as a foot in Brazil seems obvious: Russia doesn't have much of a case –  only nine Rio sports were untouched by McLaren's "thin slice" of confirmed manipulations – neither, come to think of it, does the entire Olympic movement that let it happen.

For now, to the parade of Ben Johnson, Lance Armstrong, Marion Jones & the BALCO bunch, and the rest of now four decades’ worth of drug cheats who look like mere pikers up against this crew: Vitaly Mutko (the sports minister), Russian Olympic Committee member Irina Rodionova and in the most The Americans-like twist, a Russian secret service agent accredited for midnight missions in the Sochi lab “under the cover of being a sewage and plumbing employee of the building service maintenance contractor.”

The seed for this, at least within the ambit of Richard McLaren’s “Independent Person” report, was Russia’s miserable showing at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver (and here we thought that it was just good Canadian planning that fueled Russia’s subsequent resurgence). But it goes back a lot further than that, echoing earlier schemes such as found in the old East Germany, in China, and even on this side of the world out of that BALCO lab.

What’s not so striking at this point, but only figures to be amplified as we go on here, are the ripples cast out by this latest uncovering that began, don’t forget, through a whistleblower’s warnings that were first sounded in 2013, and then amplified through media reports in Germany and the U.S. The IOC, the same group that will meet today, did very little. The IAAF tried to buy them off, and it actually worked for a while. WADA, the world’s sports-drug police, cannot do a whole lot other than set up procedures.

The sheer scale of the Russian cheating, though, touched virtually every sport that came in contact with the Moscow drug lab, and drips into another world sport basket case: Mutko is a member of FIFA’s executive committee, and chairs Russia’s 2018 World Cup local organizing committee. (At least for now. Russian president Vladimir Putin immediately announced Monday that all the main figures named in McLaren’s report have been suspended.) So, Gianni Infantino, how's that reform program going again?

It’s at this point that you completely understand what the ancients went through 23 centuries ago, when they threw up their arms and pulled the plug on the whole enterprise. Then as now, the Olympics brought unwelcome visitors, invited uncomfortable questions, and were a model of "pagan excess." In their modern iteration they have split the world before via boycotts, and yet they roll on. But now -- the billion-dollar cost overruns, the environmental degradations, the machinations, the cheating, the broken promises and unfulfilled pledges -- why bother continuing with this broken model?

More than the IOC’s moves Tuesday, the answers won’t start coming in for a couple of weeks, beginning Aug. 5, when the athletes and their compelling stories take the spotlight away from staggering skullduggery. They always have, and manage to at least for a short time give it some legitimacy and worthiness -- for how much longer might well be the overriding question.