Russia's involvement in a doping scandal is once again in the spotlight for the 2022 Beijing Olympics with its athletes unable to compete under their country's name for the third Olympics in a row.

While Russia can't participate in the games, a loophole allows its athletes to as long as they adhere to certain rules, like not wearing the Russian flag or singing the Russian national anthem.

Athletes are able to compete under the umbrella of an organization called the ROC, which stands for Russian Olympic Committee. It effectively renders the Olympic ban against Russia for its doping program to a symbolic gesture by allowing its clean athletes to still participate.

Multiple investigations by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) revealed state-sponsored doping programs that ran from 2011 to 2015 and involved more than 1,000 athletes in at least 30 sports. It involved the subversion of anti-doping protocols in two Olympics, including swapping out dirty urine for clean samples through a hole in the wall during the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.

WADA suspended the Russian Anti-Doping Agency for three years on the condition that the Russian agency release data from its Moscow lab. When it finally did, after the deadline, WADA found Russia had tampered with the data.

WADA President Witold Bańka said in a statement, released on December 2020, that "Russian authorities brazenly and illegally manipulated the Moscow Laboratory data in an effort to cover up an institutionalized doping scheme" and that "Russian authorities were afforded every opportunity to get their house in order and re-join the global anti-doping community" but actively chose a "path of deception and denial.”

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WADA declared RUSADA non-compliant and banned Russia from international competition for four years, a sentence that was later reduced to two years.

While Russia's two-year-long suspension is coming to an end, the president of WADA said on Wednesday that Russia should not necessarily expect sanctions to go away even after the suspension is over, according to Reuters.

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In addition to Russia, other countries have also been banned from competing in the Olympics.

The Kuwait Olympic Committee was also banned during the 2016 Olympics after a sports law passed in the country that did not match the principles of Olympic Movement. However, athletes from the country were still able to compete under the team name Athletes from Kuwait.

In 2000, Afghanistan was banned from the Games in Sydney because of its discrimination against women under the Taliban rule.

Contributing: Rachel Axon and Asha Gilbert of USA TODAY

You can follow the author @michelle_shen10 on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What does ROC mean at Winter Olympics? Why Russia can't compete