Icarus movie4/10/2023 ![]() ![]() One remarkable scene sees him, in Rodchenkov’s absence (due to safety concerns), testifying in front of a visibly angry group of Wada employees, suggesting to them that Rodchenkov, who has had to leave his home and family over the scandal, is himself a victim. Meanwhile, as the documentary progresses, Fogel finds himself becoming a more central figure in the story he’s trying to tell. On moving to the US, Rodchenkov morphs into a whisteblower, and his testimony is stunningly detailed, implicating everyone up to and including Vladimir Putin in the doping scandal and suggesting that it is something that has been going on across Russian sports for decades. If it’s not entirely successful, you can at least forgive its deficiencies given the access Fogel manages to acquire. The resulting film, Icarus, gamely attempts to lash together this multi-stranded shaggy dog story into something approaching a coherent documentary-cum-conspiracy thriller. When, a few months later, the World Anti-Doping Association (Wada) released a report revealing the full extent of Russian state-sponsored doping and Rodchenkov’s involvement in it, and Fogel received a panicked Skype call from Rodchenkov saying that he feared for his life and was going to flee to the US, Fogel’s gonzo experiment had become a front-row seat to one of the biggest sporting scandals in decades. Even more extraordinarily, Rodchenkov openly admitted on camera that similarly nefarious methods were used to enhance the performances of his home country’s athletes at the Sochi Winter Olympics, where Russia took home 13 gold medals. ![]() Rodchenkov threw himself into helping Fogel cheat the system with a level of enthusiasm that probably shouldn’t be expected from the head of an anti-drugs unit, going as far as smuggling Fogel’s urine through airport security. And that’s when things got really interesting. To help him perform this grand experiment, Fogel recruited a team of experts, one of whom pointed him in the direction of Grigory Rodchenkov, the eccentric director of Moscow’s Anti-Doping Centre. ![]()
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