The Big Read: WADA report on doping - this scandal is not just a Russian problem, it is an issue worldwide

Former World Anti-Doping Agency President and chairman of the WADA independent commission Richard Pound. Photo / Getty Images

It turns the stomach to imagine Russia competing at the 2016 Rio Games - but then nausea has been a regular affliction through generations of systematic cheating in Olympic sports. Most major countries have taken a turn in the dock.

Moral equivalence cannot be allowed to diminish the impact of the World Anti-Doping Agency's extraordinary report. Past crimes offer no mandate to commit new ones. But all attempts to cast this pullulating scandal as a specifically Russian problem should be qualified.

Another front in the new Cold War between Putin's mafia state and the west will doubtless be opened up by the detail of FSB (state security) agents appearing in Sochi laboratories and alleged bribes being paid to cover up positive Russian tests. Yet this is a global problem of institutions, culture and governance, as Dick Pound, one of the report's authors, acknowledged.

"Kenya has a real problem and have been very slow to acknowledge it," Pound said. And: "It's probably the tip of the iceberg. Russia is not the only country and athletics is not the only sport with a doping problem."

Numerous American scandals since the Seoul Games of 1988 preceded the apparent return of state-sponsored doping in Putin's empire. Banning Russia from the Rio Olympics next summer is now an urgent duty for the International Olympic Committee, given the numbers and apparent criminality involved, but the real solution is to take doping control out of the hands of national federations and compromised global authorities - who must be subjected to police and government oversight.

This is the lesson of the Fifa and International Association of Athletics Federations outrages. Global governing bodies in their current form are dead. They have mistaken governance for business. They exist now to chase money rather than enforce order. The incompatibility of those aims has corrupted them to their souls. Large parts of Fifa have been crooked since the Seventies or before. Olympic sports have been inherently compromised since the Cold War.

The report finds: "Within the scope of this investigation, there is clear evidence of a 'Systemic Culture of Doping in Russian Sport' perpetuated, in part, although not exclusively, through coaches and administrators, whose collective actions at times extended beyond mere administrative violations into potentially criminal acts." Of the presence of FSB agents in a Sochi Winter Olympic lab, Pound said: "It is hard to imagine what the Russian state's interest in urine would be."

Shocking. Just like everything that went before, across the world.

Redacted from the report for legal reasons were reams of material relating to the allegation that officials at the top of the IAAF demanded bribes to cover up positive tests. For that reason there could be even worse news ahead.

When they bought the drugs they bought the cover-up too, allegedly. They paid for the gear and they paid for the positive dope tests to be buried by the people who pretended to police the sport. Two for the price of one. A perfect circle of venality.

For generations public disgust over cheating in athletics has been directed at the yellow-eyed sprinters and sinewy, haunted distance runners. These were the criminals, stealing our dreams - and those of 'clean' athletes. Nobody ever quite suspected that hiding the truth had become a lucrative business opportunity for no lesser person than Lamine Diack, the former president of the IAAF.

If these allegations are proved, we will see sport fully inverted. And certainly sport fully subverted. It will complete a cycle, encompassing manufacturer, pusher, coach (almost certainly), athlete, tester, bureaucrat, spy and possibly governing body president. The only imperfection in such schemes is that an athlete was bound to squeal, if only out of anger at having to pay so much. Fifa and the IAAF have both discovered to their cost that a lie cannot endure.

To make Fifa look slightly less bad is quite an achievement for Olympic sports, where endemic cheating first set in during the Cold War and has mutated relentlessly into new forms. If in doubt, consider the 'dirtiest race in history' - the 1988 Olympic 100?metres final in Seoul, 'won' by Ben Johnson - the Balco scandal in America, widespread busts in Jamaican track and the East German state doping programme, with its echoes of Russian activities now. Even now the 100m is plagued with convicted dopers.

The suppression of positive samples has been a talking point in track and field for decades. After Carl Lewis was shown to have failed three tests during trials for the 1998 Olympics, America's 'greatest' athlete protested: "There were hundreds of people getting off. Everyone was treated the same."

Shortly before Lewis spoke, the United States Olympic Committee denied that 114 positive tests were covered up between 1988 and 2000. Rumours of samples routinely being tipped down sinks presupposed that panicked administrators were simply trying to "protect the sport". The idea was that track and field would not be able to survive the reputational damage from a household name being exposed as a shyster. In the modern age this is recast as a get-rich-quick scheme: a business in which athletes and officials can conspire.

London 2012 was not the first Games to play host to swarms of cheats, but the numbers involved in Wada's report require that great national carnival of three summers ago to wear an asterisk like all the rest. Russia won 81 medals in London - 24 of them gold, and 17 in track and field, in a £547 million stadium built with large amounts of public money.

This colossal fraud cannot stand, in sport or in life. As Pound lamented: "Public opinion is going to move towards the opinion that ALL sport is corrupt."

In all cases, outside agencies have had to do the clean-up work. The French police and later the US Anti-Doping Agency in cycling, the FBI and (belatedly) Swiss prosecutors with Fifa, and now Wada with Olympic sports.

London 2012 was "sabotaged" by dopers and doping, and athletics is "gangrenous", as French prosecutors diagnose. The people who were meant to have protected it have done far more than fail. They have conspired. The whole spectacle is repulsive.