Clare Egan heard the news last week while resting between training sessions in her hotel room in Hochfilzen, Austria, where she was preparing to compete in a biathlon World Cup event.
Egan, 33, a United States Olympian in the sport in 2018, read that the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland had banned Russia from international competition as a consequence of its state-sponsored doping scheme. She thought the ban was a good thing.
But then she read the fine print. The ban was half the length of the four-year suspension initially proposed by the World Anti-Doping Agency and, she realized, not much of a ban at all.