The scandal was uncovered by media reports and two independent investigations funded by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) which left the lab, RUSADA, the Russian athletics federation and the Russian Paralympic Committee suspended.

RUSADA’s reinstatement by WADA is the key to lifting those sanctions, and avoiding any further punishments, and on Wednesday the global anti-doping agency published the criteria Russia must meet before it can come in from the cold.

WADA revealed Russia has met the 19 criteria in the first part of its "road map to compliance" but had not satisfied the 12 criteria in part two, chief among those being the public acceptance by "the responsible authorities" of the second of those WADA-sponsored investigations, the 2016 report by Canadian legal expert Richard McLaren.

Press Association Sport understands the wording of this collective ’mea culpa’ is close to agreement but senior Russian officials have repeatedly said they do not accept all of McLaren’s findings.

They believe he has exaggerated the extent of Russia’s doping, denied that the state directed the sample-swapping operation and dismissed the report’s chief witness, former Moscow lab boss Grigory Rodchenkov, as a criminal who has invented a story to gain asylum in the United States.

WADA, athletics’ world governing body the IAAF, the International Paralympic Committee and many athletes’ groups, however, are more than satisfied McLaren provided evidence to back up Rodchenkov’s claims, most notably forensic proof of sample-tampering, and now Netflix is set to make that evidence available in the most compelling manner so far.

Viewers of Icarus, which won the audience favourite award at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in June, will also see for themselves why Russia finds it so hard to apologise for sabotaging the 2012 and 2014 Olympics and Paralympics, as well as dozens of other global events between 2011 and 2015.

In an interview with Press Association Sport, the film’s director Bryan Fogel said: "I don’t think they’re sorry - it’s just a different mindset.

"We’re looking at it through a western perspective and they’re looking at it from a different perspective, which is: ’You want us to be sorry for winning? Well, we’re not. We won. You want us to be sorry for out-smarting you?’

"(Grigory Rodchenkov’s) mother injected him with steroids when he was a teenager, so he grew up in a Russia where it is culturally and socially acceptable to think about beating the system, getting an edge on it.

"It’s like that in business, too, or politics. It’s a mentality and it’s just how it’s done.

"I also think Russians believe that if they’re doing it, everybody is doing it. And if the Americans are beating us, they must be doing it. Likewise the Chinese and so on.

"(Rodchenkov), in his mind, was never doing anything wrong in the sense that he was protecting the national team and he was doing what had been done throughout Russian sports history, certainly everything he had known.

"The anti-doping system in Russia was only set up to allow Russian athletes to dope. And this wasn’t just (the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi), this goes way back.

"OK, after Moscow 1980 they have to start doing some basic drug-testing but what they’re doing is figuring out how to get around it."

Fogel, who effectively co-stars in the film with Rodchenkov, formed a close friendship with the scientist, organised his escape to the US, where he is now living in witness protection, and helped him tell his story to the New York Times last May, which was the catalyst for the McLaren investigation.