‘Icarus’ Sundance Review: Suspenseful Doping Doc Exposes Russian Scandal
The recent turmoil in global sports over doped athletes, corrupt officials and tainted results has produced a pair of headline-grabbing supervillains in American cyclist Lance Armstrong — stripped of his seven Tour de France titles for doping — and current conspiracy poster-country Russia, which saw over a hundred of its athletes banned from the 2016 Rio Olympic games.
What started as an attempt to see if he could get away with injecting himself with performance enhancers and not get caught became an unexpected dive into the heart of the Russian doping scandal that galvanized the globe last year.
[...] Russia upped itself in meddling controversies with the American election.
With his eye on doing better at the notoriously difficult Haute Route multi-day race in the French Alps — amateur cycling’s toughest competition — and a theory that anti-doping systems are doomed to fail, Fogel sets up his experiment in performance enhancement and test evasion.
A humorous montage of posterior injections, training, urine collection, and Skype sessions follows, whereby the caustically witty Fogel and the rumpled, gregarious Rodchenkov (who travels to L.A. to “smuggle” Fogel’s untainted urine back to Moscow) form an unlikely friendship.
Though having Rodchenkov narrate passages from “1984” is a tad much, the story he relates to Fogel’s camera about his life as the mastermind behind a statewide system of athletic doping paints an engrossing, disturbing and believable picture of years-long, high-level corruption and painstaking illegality.