The eyes of the sporting world will be on the International Olympic Committee's headquarters in Lausanne on Tuesday evening when President Thomas Bach announces whether he and his board have banned Russia from the 2018 Winter Olympics.
For an Olympic powerhouse nation, the hosts of the next football World Cup no less, to be cast as an international sporting pariah, would be unprecedented.
But just 66 days before Pyeongchang 2018 starts on 9 February, the signs point to Bach doing precisely that.
The German and his board will have spent the afternoon poring over the findings and recommendations of a 16-month investigation headed up by the former president of Switzerland, Samuel Schmid, the BBC reports.
His team have been looking into the allegations of government involvement in the cheating when Russia hosted the last Winter Games in Sochi in 2014, and deciding whether there is enough evidence to conclude that this is indeed what happened, despite repeated denials.
Certainly this is one of the biggest decisions the IOC has ever taken, and the most important moment yet in the doping saga that has cast a shadow over the Olympic movement.
We have been here before, of course.
On the eve of the 2016 Rio Games, the IOC came under huge pressure to ban the Russian team from the Olympics after an independent report by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren concluded the country had engaged in a state-sponsored doping conspiracy that benefitted 1,000 athletes across 30 sports between 2012 and 2015.
Despite this, the IOC could not bring itself to do so, handing responsibility for sanctions to the various international sporting federations, meaning hundreds of athletes competed, and 56 medals were won.
So why should things be any different this time around?
Despite initial fears that Bach's close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin - and a lack of proof that would satisfy legal requirements - may mean the IOC could try to swerve a ban and resort to a hefty fine as an alternative means of punishing Russia, matters first started to look bleak for the country last month.
