Can you say ‘bad optics’? Russian fails doping test

PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — Just what Russia needs: a doping positive.

A Russian athlete — a curler, of all people — tested positive for the banned substance meldonium, best known for fetching a 15-month ban for Russian tennis star Maria Sharapova in 2016.

Russian Olympic officials disclosed they had been informed of a positive test but said the B sample had yet to be tested to confirm the findings.

Other reports identified the athlete as Aleksandr Krushelnitskiy, who won a bronze medal last week in the mixed curling competition with his wife.

“Meldonium in the doping test? I’m not aware of all this,” Krushelnitskiy said in Russian in a story published by the Russian news outlet RIA Novosti.

If true, the headlines won’t look good — “Russian tests positive at Olympics” — in light of the allegations of widespread state-sponsored doping at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi.

That resulted in a diluted team of 168 athletes being invited to Pyeongchang to compete under a neutral flag as “Olympic Athletes from Russia” after supposedly being vetted for any doping suspicion.

The Russian flag was not present at the opening ceremony, but the International Olympic Committee had left open the possibility of it returning for the closing ceremony if the Russians behaved.

The circumstances of the doping offense, though, may provide some mitigation, being a substance of debatable performance enhancement in a sport where it would appear to do little good.

Meldonium was developed by Soviet scientists in the 1970s to treat coronary disease in arteries by expanding them and thus increasing blood flow.

It is primarily used in Eastern Europe and was not on the radar of anti-doping officials until they realized huge numbers of Russian athletes were using it. According to one 2015 study of tests from more than 4,000 Russian athletes, 17 percent had chemical traces of it in their urine.

The World Anti-Doping Agency put it on its monitoring list in 2015 and formally banned it in January 2016. Two months later, Sharapova confirmed she had tested positive for meldonium, admitting she had taken it for 10 years to treat various ailments and claiming she didn’t know it was a prohibited substance.

This is believed to be the first meldonium positive in curling, which rarely if ever has brushes with the doping police.