Short answers, pulled from the story.
Association football topped the list of the most popular sports in Russia according to Yandex search analysis results, recording between five and ten million requests. A 2018 Mediascope survey, however, found ice hockey led in viewer interest at 50.9 percent, though that survey was conducted one month after the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.
Russia has had 51 medals stripped for doping violations, the most of any country. That figure is four times the number of the runner-up and accounts for nearly a third of the global total. The state-sponsored doping scandal led to partial bans from the 2016 Rio Olympics and the 2018 Winter Olympics.
On the 12th of October 2023, the IOC suspended the Russian Olympic Committee after it unilaterally placed the National Olympic Committees of four Ukrainian regions under its jurisdiction: Donetsk Oblast, Luhansk Oblast, Kherson Oblast, and Zaporizhzhia Oblast. The IOC ruled this violated the Olympic Charter by infringing on the territorial integrity of the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine.
Bandy, informally called Russian hockey, is considered a national sport in Russia and one of its biggest spectator sports. The Federation of International Bandy was founded in 1955 by the Soviet Union and three Nordic countries, and the Soviet national team won every Bandy World Championship from 1957 through 1979. It is the only sport to enjoy the patronage of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Maria Sharapova won five Grand Slam titles, and Anastasia Myskina won the 2004 French Open. On the men's side, Yevgeny Kafelnikov won the 1996 French Open and the 1999 Australian Open, while Marat Safin won the 2000 US Open and the 2005 Australian Open. Daniil Medvedev won the 2021 US Open and briefly reached world number one in early 2022.
Vitaly Petrov became Russia's first Formula One driver in 2010, racing for Renault and later Caterham. He finished third at the 2011 Australian Grand Prix. The Russian Grand Prix joined the Formula One calendar for the 2014 season at the Sochi Autodrom before being cancelled in 2022 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.