trelerke-politics Review of Icarus

Icarus (2017)

Starts in one place and ends somewhere else completely, awesome!

[10/10 · 9 August 2017]

Saw "Icarus" on Netflix, awesome shaggy dog of a documentary that starts off as a kind of "Supersize Me" movie about an amateur cyclist, Bryan Fogel (director, producer, obsessive/futile/driven amateur cyclist) who is interested in how performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) would effect his own performance but then it goes down the rabbit hole of general athletic doping specifically in regard to Russia's state sponsored program. (His own project is jettisoned about a third in) Essentially, the movie maker stumbles on the main players involved in Russia and the movie becomes both a wonderful piece of muck raking journalism as well as an actual political thriller where real people's lives are changed/threatened. The movie chronicles how the Russian World anti doping agency (WADA) office actually was responsible for enabling doping in Russian athletics, similar to Generals in Mexico responsible for fighting the drug cartels who were actually heading the cartels. The main character in the movie, Grigory Rodchenkov, is a garrulous, smart and morally complex person who is put at genuine risk by "turning states evidence" against the Russian program. One of his closest associates has a mysterious fatal heart attack. His superior is a close friend of Putin's, and is now something like Deputy prime minister, so this goes all the way up. There was a very careful description how doping controls were cannily circumvented at the Sochi Olympics (lots of James Bond level subterfuge). Further, no matter your position on doping in sports, I personally don't care what adults do, turns out WADA is pretty helpless/useless. A truly great movie, starts in one place - ends up going somewhere else completely.