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Western governments, it turns out, have been grandstanding. The only way to threaten an Olympic host is with a boycott, and the west has more to lose from that than Russia does. In recent weeks Russia and its international adversaries have both shown their hands. President Barack Obama announced that neither he nor vice-president Joseph Biden would be in Sochi and named a VIP “delegation” stocked with gay former athletes. French president François Hollande and German president Joachim Gauck will not be there, either. In mid-December, meanwhile, the Russian Duma passed an amnesty for thousands of prisoners, including two members of the “oppositional art” band Pussy Riot and several Greenpeace activists, and released the Yeltsin-era oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky from the prison camp where he spent the past decade.

If this is where things wind up resting, then Mr Putin will emerge from Sochi with his image unmarred, and perhaps enhanced. Both Pussy Riot and Mr Khodorkovsky were due to be released soon anyway. Keeping them locked up would have been a reputation-damaging headache.

The west, on the other hand, has managed only the feeblest of snubs. Who can name a member of any past Olympic “delegation”? The US president and the vice-president both skipped the Seoul (1988) and the Sydney (2000) Olympics. For that matter, neither Mr Obama nor Mr Biden attended the funeral of Margaret Thatcher last spring.