“I think, perhaps, Russia is the most relaxing country in the world.” “You think so?” “…No.”
This exchange between director Bryan Fogel and the head of the Moscow Anti-Doping Centre, Grigory Rodchenkov, cuts to the heart of Icarus, slyly condensing the, uh, restrictive policies of the Kremlin and drolly foreshadowing the drama neither could have seen coming in their wildest imaginations.
Icarus wisely buries the lede a bit, presenting itself at first as the story of a man on a crusade to expose the joke that is anti-doping testing. Bryan Fogel is an avid amateur cyclist who tackles some of the hardest amateur races in the world. Faced with the crushing revelations that Lance Armstrong, feel-good hero of the decade, doped all throughout his career (along with many other athletes), Fogel wanted to make a documentary exposing just how easy it is to cheat the system, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
So, Fogel tries to enlist folks in sports medicine, preferably someone involved with anti-doping testing, to put him on a regimen of performing enhancing drugs to see how it affected his performance and how to get a negative on the drug tests. (I’ll leave it to your moral compass to decide the ethicality of this experiment, good intensions or no.) Eventually, fate paired him with the aforementioned Grigory Rodchenkov.
That name might ring a bell for you. Remember that big New York Times story a year or two ago about the Russian Olympic athletes doping? Well, Rodchenkov was the making sure those tests came back negative during the Sochi games.
Now, Fogel didn’t know this at the time he befriended Rodchenkov. He was merely the guy in charge of his regimen. But things quickly escalate, and eventually Fogel helps him when the Kremlin comes a-knocking to cover their tracks. With Rodchenkov’s life at stake (he’s currently in protective custody in an unknown location), Fogel gets him out of Russia and thus becomes entwined in a dangerous political game that involves Ludlum-level spycraft and dead bodies turning up.
My description can’t do the story justice. Icarus is a fast paced and gut-wrenchingly suspenseful thriller. I don’t want to give away the particulars because that would spoil the impact of just how wild the sequence of events that ultimately leads to the New York Times story is. All presented in appropriately dramatic fashion. There’s a lot of thumping mood-setting ominous underscoring.
Occasionally, though, Fogel’s desire to craft a political thriller gets in the way of the storytelling. Some points are unclear or rushed past, especially in the beginning section where Fogel’s doing his grand doping experiment. Motivations are sometimes muddy, and there are momentary lapses of continuity between one story beat and another. But in the grand scheme of things, these flaws don’t really matter. They don’t interfere with the greater ramifications of the doping scandal and coverup.
I understand if you might not care about a sports documentary. I have a lot of friends on the artsy side who have an active contempt for sports and have no reticence in their declarations of how stupid sports and sports fans are (which sticks a little needle through my Formula 1 loving heart a bit each time).
But Icarus is not a sports film. Olympic doping isn’t the point.
It’s not unusual to hear about people unfortunate enough to be on Putin’s bad side (especially journalists) dying under suspicious circumstances (frequently ruled as heart attacks or suicides). Take, for example, that Buzzfeed story about all the alleged Russian assassinations on British soil. That is the point of Icarus: conspiracies that go up to the highest level, and the highest level going to any length to keep up appearances and keep away bad press.
It’s not controversial to say that Russia prefers its press as propaganda, and any deviations from that paradigm can be deadly dangerous. It’s what happens when the free press becomes the enemy of the state. Sports are just the threshold the film passes to examine the consequences of authoritarianism under the guise of patriotism.
Sorry for getting all political there. But Icarus, an entertaining and mostly well-crafted film, is inherently political, and it’s difficult not to take that exit on the highway of discourse and hot takes.
The film is now streaming on Netflix. Director Bryan Fogel, along with producers Dan Cogan, Jim Swartz, David Fialkow hosted a screening and reception of the film on Thursday at The Whitby Hotel.
