ĭocumentary films often have a social impact, but rarely has one changed as many lives in real time as this one expect the Academy Awards to take notice. Today’s action, which links directly to the evidence brought forth by Rodchenkov with the help of Fogel and Rodchenkov’s lawyer, Jim Walden, though, is perhaps the most stunning decision the IOC has ever made. Back then, the IOC had made the stunning decision to allow Russia to compete, while banning over 100 athletes, chiefly the entire track-and-field team. That report, in turn, nearly caused Russia’s forced withdrawal from the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. Rodchenkov’s revelations spurred an explosive 2016 report from the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), led by Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren, that laid out proof of at least 1,000 Russian athletes doping, in 30 sports - and that’s just 2011 to 2015. All of this under the noses of World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) inspectors, and as Russia was winning the most medals of any country. Or that he’d then take Rodchenkov’s mound of evidence to the New York Times, exposing Russia’s “dark-of-night” doping operation at the 2014 Sochi Winter Games - which involved Rodchencov’s working with the FSB (a Russian intelligence service, one of the successors to the KGB) to switch dirty urine samples for clean urine collected months earlier. Or that he’d be the one to buy Rodchenkov the plane ticket that got him to safe harbor in Los Angeles, just after two of his associates had dropped dead under suspicious circumstances and as Putin was denouncing Rodchenkov as an enemy of the state in the press. Grigory Rodchenkov. What Fogel didn’t know when he went to Moscow to trail his new friend around with a camera was that he’d wind up inside Russia’s national “anti-doping” laboratory, which was really a front for Russia’s state-run program to juice its Olympic athletes - with alleged ties to Vladimir Putin - of which Rodchenkov happened to be the chief architect.įogel’s realization that Rodchenkov isn’t just a guy in a Russian sports lab, but the guy (and possibly Putin’s fall guy), didn’t come till much later on. He also didn’t know that his footage from that day would become evidence of a criminal operation and an institutional conspiracy. Fate brought him to a jolly, mustachioed guy in Russia with a penchant for shirtless Skype sessions. He got his PEDs from an American doctor (they’re the same drugs used in controversial men’s anti-aging regimens), but had to look elsewhere for a scientist with a questionable moral compass who’d coach him in how to dope and get away with it. He was an amateur cyclist and second-time filmmaker in Los Angeles with a harebrained idea to try out doping himself, and do it on camera - kind of like Super Size Me of performance-enhancing drugs. When director Bryan Fogel set out to make his jaw-dropping, absolutely insane doping documentary, Icarus, he didn’t know that he’d walk away with exclusive footage of what may go down as the biggest scandal in the history of sport. And if you want to see how it went down, all you have to do turn on Netflix. Grigory Rodchenkov, of a brazen and pervasive state-run doping program that has likely tainted Russian results for the entirety of modern Olympic history. This comes after incontrovertible evidence emerged last year, much of it from a whistle-blower named Dr. In what once seemed like an unfathomable turn of events, Russia has been banned from competing in the 2018 Winter Olympic Games. We’ve updated it to include context about the Olympics banning Russia from the 2018 Winter Games. This piece originally ran in August 2017.
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