Brennan: Vladimir Putin's laughable response

It’s so darn confusing being Russian sports fan Vladimir Putin these days. He whines when he should celebrate. He complains when he should be happy. He screams about discrimination when he instead should say, “Thanks for the gift, Thomas Bach.”

Instead of having zero percent of his Olympic team in Rio, it’s looking like he’ll have about 75% of it there, which is about 75% more than should be there.

Even though his government and his sports ministers and his athletes devised and participated in the worst state-sponsored doping conspiracy this side of East Germany, close to 300 Russian athletes will be allowed to compete in the upcoming Summer Olympics, many of them athletes who, for all we know, have been doping for years.

Can someone translate "you lucky dog" into Russian, please?

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But, appearing at an event with Russian athletes Wednesday in Moscow, Putin wasn’t a happy guy. He was livid, talking about “discrimination” and how “unfairly” Russian athletes had been treated.

Someone is seriously confused here. It’s the other way around, Vlad. It’s the athletes from countries playing by the rules — the Germans and the Canadians, the Japanese and the British and the Americans — who are being treated unfairly, who will have to compete against and perhaps even lose to Russians who have been part of their nation’s elaborate doping scheme for years.

We hear so much about performance-enhancing drug use in sports today that our heads spin. When Putin blames the United States for, well, everything, we know, of course, that this nation did give the world Lance Armstrong and Marion Jones, the his-and-her doping cheats of the 21st century, if not of all-time.

But the grand deception and moral depravity of individual athletes is not what we’re talking about in this case. No, this is state-sponsored, systemic, come-one, come-all, institutional sports doping.

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What does that mean, exactly? I think we need an example, so let’s take what the Russians did and see how it would look if it had happened in the United States:

The cheating would have been led by the Health and Human Services secretary, a member of President Obama’s cabinet, and would have included the U.S. Olympic Committee, the FBI or the CIA (or both) and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. It would have involved hundreds of U.S. athletes from all Olympic sports, winter and summer. It would have gone on for five years, and resulted in the outright stealing of dozens if not hundreds of medals and titles from clean athletes around the world who deserved them.

That’s what Russia did. That’s what Russia got away with, except for its track and field team — which is banned except for one lonely long jumper — and a few other athletes here and there from other sports.

Think about that when the Russian flag enters the Opening Ceremony a week from Friday. Think about that when the first Russian wins an Olympic gold medal. Think about that when we later find out that athlete was in on the doping program. Think about the fourth-place finisher in that event, the one just off the medal stand.

Think about it all, and wonder how you’ll be able to trust any event you're watching at these Olympic Games.