While Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine drags into its second year, its athletes are hoping to get back on the sports field.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has recommended letting competitors from Russia and Belarus take part as individual neutrals in upcoming international competitions.
The decision has come as a blow to Ukraine, which has argued vehemently against allowing their participation.
Like other countries Russia has been keen to use international sport to showcase the nation's athletic prowess.
But what makes Russia unusual are the lengths to which the government and military will go to produce award-winning athletes - including an extensive doping programme that has seen Russian athletes banned from competing abroad.
Wimbledon has also lifted its ban on Russian and Belarusian tennis players as long as they agree not to support their countries' leaders or governments. That was despite Ukraine's Elina Svitolina appealing for their exclusion while "innocent Ukrainians are still being killed".
The Defence Ministry in Moscow has for decades been running extensive programmes to train sportspeople who went on to achieve remarkable success.
Military links
The best-known such programme is called the Central Sports Club of the Army (CSKA). It employs hundreds of coaches, operates scores of sites across Russia and is reportedly training more than 10,000 athletes.
The club - which soon turns 100 - has been doing so well that its members netted most of the medals won by athletes from Russia in the last Summer Olympics, held in Tokyo in 2021.
At those games, Russian athletes competed as part of Team ROC (Russian Olympic Committee), after the national team was banned over claims of state-sponsored doping.
Defence minister Sergei Shoigu met the military athletes at a ceremony after the competition to hand them awards and to tell them to start preparing for the next Olympics.
"There is no time to waste, you need to get to work," he said. "We'll do all we can so you can properly prepare for the next games."
Another prominent sporting programme affiliated with the Russian military is DOSAAF (Volunteer Society for Assisting the Army, Aviation and Fleet), which also has its roots in the 1920s.
The Defence Ministry is involved in running and funding DOSAAF, and it is headed by a general.
President Putin described it as a "real school of bravery" which helped train numerous military commanders, cosmonauts and pilots.
DOSAAF has also produced a number of Olympic medalists, including Vitalina Batsarashkina, the first Russian athlete to win gold at the Tokyo Olympics. She trained at the organisation's Club for Technical, Military and Practical Types of Sport in the Siberian city of Omsk.
Celebrating her gold medal, DOSAAF called it "the highest form of patriotism".