{"id":6181,"date":"2017-11-28T19:46:54","date_gmt":"2017-11-29T00:46:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=6181"},"modified":"2018-01-31T20:05:34","modified_gmt":"2018-02-01T01:05:34","slug":"icarus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/28\/icarus\/","title":{"rendered":"Icarus."},"content":{"rendered":"

Icarus<\/em>, a documentary now available on Netflix, covers the Russian state-sponsored doping program for Olympic athletes from the most direct, personal angle possible: The director was working with the architect of the program on a completely different project when the story broke in a German documentary, The Doping Secret: How Russia Makes its Winners<\/em>. So instead of merely following the chronology of the program\u2019s execution, the leak to the press, and the subsequent drama around the WADA recommendations to ban all Russian athletes from the 2016 Olympics and the IOC\u2019s decision to give WADA the finger, Icarus<\/em> gives it to viewers in real time from the perspective of one of the whistleblowers who ends up fearing for his life.<\/p>\n

Filmmaker Bryan Fogel decided, on what appears to be a whim, to race in a Haute Route cycling event, a seven-day endurance test across difficult terrain, this time in the Alps of southeastern France. (They also hold similar events in the Pyr\u00e9n\u00e9es and in the Rockies.) He finishes in the top 20, but his body just gives out near the end, so he does what any normal person would do in response \u2013 he decides to start doping to see how much a little artificial help will improve his performance. (He notes that the event bans performance-enhancing drugs but doesn\u2019t bother testing for them.) He contacts the former head of the main U.S. testing lab, who agrees to help but eventually reneges and refers Fogel to Grigory Rodchenkov, the director of the Russian Anti-Doping Centre, a World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited laboratory that would test athletes for PED usage. Rodchenkov also knew quite a bit about the benefits of the various PEDs available to Fogel and helped him design a protocol, with the help of an \u201canti-aging\u201d doctor here in the U.S., to improve his performance in a second shot at the Haute Route.<\/p>\n

That second race doesn\u2019t go as well as planned, but it becomes thoroughly secondary to the film\u2019s real story: The German documentary exposes the Russians\u2019 state-run doping program, claiming many of the country\u2019s medals in recent Olympics, including Sochi, were achieved by athletes who should have failed PED tests but didn\u2019t. Rodchenkov was actually running the doping program on the side, even while he was running the anti-doping facility, and during the filming of Icarus<\/em>, he begins to fear that the government is watching him and possibly preparing to arrest him, so he flees to the U.S. and tells his everything to the New York Times<\/em> for a piece that ran on May 12, 2016<\/a>. That article blew the doors off the scandal and led to a longer WADA investigation, which the IOC chose to ignore because of reasons we can only imagine \u2013 as Rodchenko makes it clear that he believes Vladimir Putin, who approved the doping program, will stop at nothing to silence his enemies. We learn that one of Rodchenkov\u2019s associates died, allegedly of a heart attack, in February 2016, shortly after the German film aired; another died the same month, with both men former directors of Russia\u2019s anti-doping agency.<\/p>\n

There is so much to unpack in Icarus<\/em>, which is thoroughly gripping even though you invest the first 40 minutes or so in a story that doesn\u2019t matter. (It\u2019s never really clear why Fogel is willing to subject his body to the doping regimen, whether it\u2019s a desire to win, a desire to show what doping can do, a Morgan Spurlock-style attitude to filmmaking, or something else). What was a weird but intriguing documentary that looked at the history of doping and the cat-and-mouse game between the athletes who use such drugs and the labs that try to catch them turns into a darker, real-life spy thriller. The film doesn\u2019t bother with bothsidesism; Rodchenkov\u2019s credibility isn\u2019t questioned, nor are we given any reason to question it, and he provides Fogel with detailed notes on specific athletes\u2019 regimens that seem to immediately convince a group of appalled members of WADA who walked into a conference room believing that this kind of program was physically impossible. (The KGB manages to tamper with WADA\u2019s tamper-proof caps, among other tricks.) And a subsequent special investigation, led by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren, found that over 1000 Russian athletes had doped in events over the time period covered.<\/p>\n

Two angles in particular stand out from this. One, relevant to those of us here with an interest in baseball, is that a sufficiently determined and organized group can defeat even a sophisticated testing program. This isn\u2019t about masking agents, or super-secret new drugs that haven\u2019t hit testing protocols yet, but about physical exchange of dirty samples for clean ones that won\u2019t test positive. It shows how difficult such a scheme would be to pull off \u2026 but also that it was pulled off, successfully, for years, and therefore is at least feasible.<\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t know how you can watch Icarus<\/em> now without drawing the obvious parallel: Vladimir Putin approved a program to interfere with a competition that went beyond his own borders to try to engineer the results he desired \u2013 and even when given irrefutable proof of what he did, he just dismisses it as, in essense, fake news. He even gets away with it, despite those meddling kids, because I\u2019ve seen jellyfish with stronger spines than the IOC, which just gave carte blanche to any major power to dope the hell out of its athletes. There\u2019s even a scene where we see a Russian TV show airing emails between Fogel and Rodchenkov \u2013 emails obtained via hacking. We\u2019re fighting someone who appears willing to do anything, perhaps even kill, to achieve his goals, and who thus far has proved immune to any penalty or retribution. It\u2019s a grim projection for the future of international sport \u2026 and our elections, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Icarus, a documentary now available on Netflix, covers the Russian state-sponsored doping program for Olympic athletes from the most direct, personal angle possible: The director was working with the architect of the program on a completely different project when the story broke in a German documentary, The Doping Secret: How Russia Makes its Winners. So […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[976,925,612,215,968],"class_list":["post-6181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2017-best-documentary-feature-nominees","tag-2017-movies","tag-documentaries","tag-movies","tag-netflix","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6181"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6183,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6181\/revisions\/6183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}