Is athletics heading for a compromise deal over Russia's participation in Rio Games after doping scandal?

Yesterday Russia opened its doors to the international media, hoping it would carry the message that this doping-ravaged country is doing all it can to write the wrongs of the past and is also doing it transparently.

But the PR exercise inside Moscow’s notorious “anti-doping” lab was punctured somewhat when the Russian Olympic Committee admitted that 14 of the 31 athletes caught, by re-testing samples taken at the Beijing Games, belonged to them.

While it didn’t name them, state media did. The fall out from all this, apart from heaping more shame on the Russians and making their participation at Rio more difficult to stomach perhaps, is a redistribution of medals.

Among others Team GB’s javelin thrower at the Games, Goldie Sayers, should get a medal, albeit eight years late, and potentially too the 4 x 400m relay team.

While Russia, currently banned by the IAAF, is supposedly being judged on what it is doing now, the pressure to keep them isolated, especially from within the Olympic family, builds almost by the day.

But almost unnoticed, it appears Russia and those who ultimately will rule on their participation seem to be moving towards a compromise deal.

Recently, the IAAF President Seb Coe called on countries to exclude anyone caught doping from international teams, whether their bans had expired or not. Yesterday, the Russian Athletics Federation announced it would not select any dopers for Rio.

In addition, Russia’s outspoken and usually defiant Sports Minister, Vitaly Mutko, seemed to buy into the compromise, saying: "I don't see serious reasons for not letting our athletes take part in the Olympics, I think punishments for doping violations should always be personal.”

Any day now, the International Olympic Committee will reveal how many positives they’ve swept up from re-tests of London 2012 samples. It won’t be as many as caught in the Beijing trawl but the number of guilty athletes will still almost certainly be in double figures.

Russian athletes were targeted in the Beijing re-tests - the same applies for London. Also, remember there is an investigation underway into allegations that, at their own winter Games in Sochi, an elaborate, sample swapping operation was in place to beat the testers.

All this when we are just weeks away from "Rio Judgement Day" for the Russians.

Given what Coe is urging federations to do and given what Mutko said yesterday it would be no surprise if Russian athletes who’ve never failed a test were allowed to compete in Rio but the ones who have been caught were not.

Some will call it a practical compromise, diffusing the potential start of a break up of the Olympic movement, others will call it a cowardly fudge.

Those with the latter view, might just have to learn to live with it.