The Russian flag will be flying at the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, after all, and the athletes from a nation mired in an ongoing drug scandal will be allowed to compete on the sporting world’s largest stage.

Less than two weeks before the start of the Rio Games, the International Olympic Committee ruled against barring Russia from the Summer Olympics but did approve measures that could reduce the number of Russian athletes participating. Members of the executive board met on a conference call Sunday and granted wide-reaching powers to the 28 individual federations that govern each sport to rule on which Russian athletes would be permitted to compete in their respective disciplines.

While that could curtail Russia’s participation in the Rio Olympics, it means the exact number of participants and medal hopefuls representing the nation could remain in flux until days before the opening ceremony, which is scheduled for Aug. 5.

While the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the international body that oversees track and field, has already ruled that Russia would not be permitted to compete in Olympic competition, other governing bodies will have big decisions to make in the coming days. Many sports federations, such as gymnastics, have already indicated a preference to see Russian athletes competing for Olympic medals. Bruno Grandi, president of the FIG, the international gymnastics federation, for example, said in a statement last week, “Blanket bans have never been and will never be just.”

No nation had ever been barred from competing at an Olympics for doping, but with sentiment growing against the Russian athletes and questions about whether they’d compete clean in Rio, the IOC faced a difficult decision. Last week the World Anti-Doping Agency, the international body that polices doping in sports, released a damning report that charged Russia with operating a prolific state-run doping program spanning 30 sports over several years.

As the doping scandal grew, more than a dozen anti-doping agencies from around the world, including those from the United States and Canada, banded together and urged the IOC to issue a wholesale ban of Russia from these Olympics, an extraordinary measure that would have included athletes who’ve never tested positive for banned substances or been implicated in the scandal.

The IOC opted not to take immediate action last week, preferring to wait for an important ruling from the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which last Thursday upheld the ban on Russia’s track and field teams. In June those squads were barred from the Rio Games by the IAAF. The court’s ruling effectively set a precedent that a sport’s international federation had the authority to prohibit certain athletes from competing.

The Russian Olympic Committee said in a statement last week that the court’s ruling unfairly punished a large swath of Russian athletes for the alleged misdeeds of a few. “The CAS decision violates the rights of all clean athletes who from today will also bear a collective responsibility for the guilt of others,” the committee said.

While officials with the Russian sports ministry have acknowledged a “culture of doping,” they have denied any form of government involvement. Russia President Vladimir Putin has been vocal about what he sees as an unfair process and a political witch-hunt that has seeped into the sports world.

“Today, we see a dangerous return to this policy of letting politics interfere with sport,” Putin said in a statement last week, harkening back to Cold War-era relations. “Yes, this intervention takes different forms today, but the essence remains the same; to make sport an instrument for geopolitical pressure and use it to form a negative image of countries and peoples. The Olympic movement, which is a tremendous force for uniting humanity, once again could find itself on the brink of division.

Before a single Olympic event has been contested, doping has already emerged as a dominant storyline of these Summer Games. The IOC and WADA have been trying to cleanse the Rio Games of known cheaters and have been retesting samples from the 2008 and 2012 Summer Olympics. They found 98 athletes who tested positive for prohibited substances, including at least 23 medalist from the Beijing Games.

Since competing under the Russian flag, the country has been among the top three or four medal winners in each of the past five Summer Olympics. Russia, which has traditionally been a power in track and field, wrestling and gymnastics especially, won 79 medals at the 2012 London Games, trailing only the United States (103) and China (88). Russia hosted the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi and won more medals there than any other country – 13 golds and 33 overall — a feat that might not stand the test of time after the IOC and WADA completes their doping inquiry and metes out individual punishments.

The absence of any number of Russian athletes will surely have a major impact on the medal hopes of athletes competing in almost every sport. Russian typically sends an Olympic team of more than 400 athletes at the Summer Games. The last time Russian athletes missed the Summer Games was 1984, when the then-Soviet Union was among 14 communist nations to boycott the Olympics. That year the United States won 83 gold medals at the Los Angeles Summer Games, which is still an Olympic record.