RIO DE JANEIRO — The brothers Dan and Anthony Rigney of Australia attended the Olympic weight lifting competition on Sunday and were not exactly mortified that the sport is more polluted than Guanabara Bay.

Sure, they want athletes to be drug-free, but they also want to be entertained by raw human power. So yes, they would have preferred to see the Russian and Bulgarian teams, which were barred for doping. Likewise with Ilya Ilyin, a suspended two-time Olympic champion from Kazakhstan, who is the Barry Bonds of the clean and jerk.

“You like to see world records,” said Dan Rigney, 28, a physiotherapist and competitive lifter from Sydney. “It’s like baseball. People just want to see home runs.”

There has long been a wink-and-nod pragmatism about weight lifting. Drugs have been a hushed but vital part of doing business. If there is an argument to be made that any sport should permit doping, or even make it mandatory, that sport is weight lifting.