Although a Russian team will be absent from Pyeongchang, 168 athletes from the country will be present under a neutral flag. The doping scandal which led to Russia's exclusion was started by whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov, the former head of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory and while what he revealed may have been important to the integrity of the Olympics, he's not proving to be very popular with President Vladimir Putin.

VLADIMIR PUTIN RUSSIAN PRESIDENT "Now they've got this idiot in witness protection in the USA. Listen, the man obviously has problems. With the law. He says that he broke the law. He should be put in prison. Instead of that he was appointed to manage the Russian Anti-doping Laboratory. He made suicidal attempts, that's what he said. May God grant him good health and hopefully he will recover. But all this means something. It means he has problems. And everything is based on the statement of this person, of a person who can hardly be trusted at all. Moreover, we are told that he works under the control of the US special services and that this is good. Good for whom? It's bad for us."