Icarus opens with Lance Armstrong, closes with George Orwell’s 1984, and in between offers a play-by-play of what the director calls “the single biggest scandal in sports history”: the revelation of Russia’s massive state-sponsored doping program, a decades-long operation that reached its zenith during the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. The film began as a Morgan Spurlock–style stunt. Best known as the creator and star of the off-Broadway show Jewtopia, Fogel is also a competitive amateur cyclist, and like so many fans of the sport, he’d long wondered whether Lance Armstrong, cycling’s Michael Jordan, owed any of his incredible success to the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Then in 2013, Armstrong, under pressure from a criminal investigation, finally confessed. The seven-time Tour de France winner was subsequently stripped of his titles, ordered to pay back his prize money, and became, in the public view, says Fogel, “the criminal mastermind who had essentially created doping, forced people to dope.”
Fogel was surprised, not that Armstrong was using PEDs—“I just kind of assumed he was”—but, that he’d never been caught, despite having been tested hundreds of times. “I was not so much like: ‘What is wrong with Lance Armstrong?’,” the director remembers. “I was going: ‘What is wrong with this system?’ ” Icarus, in Fogel’s original conception, would be a way of vindicating Armstrong, or at least turning the tables on the anti-doping agencies that were quick to claim the cyclist’s downfall as their victory. Fogel would enter the Haute Route, the toughest amateur cycling race in the world (like the “hardest seven days of the Tour de France back to back”). He would enlist the help of a premiere anti-doping scientist to help him self-administer an Armstrong-worthy drug regimen in preparation. And then he would win—or at least beat his previous best time—all the while proving that he could clear myriad anti-doping checkpoints. “I said, Nobody’s ever seen someone dope themselves on camera. We haven’t seen what these drugs do or don’t do. We’re being told as a society that they’re harmful and dangerous to us. Are they? And the bigger question is: If I could evade detection, what did it mean not just for cycling”—among the most rigorously monitored sports—“but for all sports?”
Through some combination of bad luck and natural athletic limitation, months of shooting himself up with steroids did not, in the end, give Fogel the competitive advantage he needed to win the Haute Route. But from that stunt was born a much more interesting movie. Casting for a scientist to help him plan his own doping program, Fogel found his way to Grigory Rodchenkov, director of the World Anti Doping Association–accredited Moscow lab and a one-time competitive runner who had no compunctions about coaching Fogel over Skype in how to dose himself and beat the system. Rodchenkov, a jovial eccentric prone to speaking in charmingly cryptic riddles, even goes so far as to travel to Los Angeles to smuggle the director’s urine back to Russia, where it can be tested.
If the name Grigory Rodchenkov is ringing bells, it’s because he was the whistleblower at the center of a May 2016 New York Times exposé that revealed the extent of Russia’s widespread doping program, and explained how Rodchenkov’s lab, at governmental behest, had enabled Russian athletes to dope their way through the Sochi Olympics (using a special Rodchenkov-designed drug cocktail) and to evade detection through a complex urine-swapping protocol. About halfway through its two-hour run time, Icarus becomes a real-time exploration of the lead-up to and fallout from that Times story. As news of Russian doping conspiracies begin to trickle out in the aftermath of Sochi—first in a 2014 German documentary, then in a report from an independent WADA commission—Rodchenkov, fearing for his life, enlists Fogel’s help to flee Russia. He arrives in Los Angeles bearing hard drive evidence of his country’s foul play, comes clean on camera, brings his story to the Times, and enters a U.S. witness protection program amid a simultaneous investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI (all that, only to watch as the International Olympic Committee, against WADA advisement, decides ultimately to allow most Russian athletes to compete at the 2016 Rio Olympics).
If you’ve paid attention to the news, none of Icarus’s revelations will feel earth-shattering (though the film does show how instrumental Fogel was in delivering the story to the Times). But this documentary distinguishes itself as an exceptionally riveting portrait of an exceptionally fascinating figure: Rodchenkov, the mystifying double agent—by day, a WADA star who worked to develop cutting-edge anti-doping measures, by night, Putin’s henchman, who worked to undermine those same techniques. As Fogel reveals him, Rodchenkov is a sort of gentle-hearted Orwell-obsessed mad scientist—he explains his actions as “pure, exact double-think”—whose inconsistent relationship with the truth can perhaps offer American viewers some window into the Russian mind-set, and the Russian propaganda machine at work.
I spoke to Fogel by phone about the film, his enigmatic main subject, and how he ended up in the middle of a massive global scandal.
