Movie Poster

Even to understand the word "doublethink" involves the use of doublethink. I was doing in parallel two things which cancelled out each other and being fully contradictory. Doping and anti-doping.

# Review

Icarus is the Greek tragic hero who flew too close to the Sun. In this Academy Award documentary, the filmmaker explores the shady world of doping in sports, and unintentionally gets embroiled in Russia’s state-sponsored doping program.

The film starts with the filmmaker Fogel wanting to explore how easy it is to take performance-enhancing drugs and still pass drug tests. Fogel contacts the director of the Russian national anti-doping laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov, in order to develop a program to help Fogel take drugs and get away with it. When the Russian doping scandal is exposed, with Rodchenkov at the heart of the scandal, Fogel explores the global anti-doping apparatus and the geopolitics behind sports.

I’ve long known that few top-performing athletes are completely natural and that the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is largely toothless to stop the more sophisticated cheaters. This film, however, dove deep into the inadequacies of anti-doping controls and how easy it was for a country to circumvent the measures. Then the film showed how the sporting authorities, such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC), really could not do anything to penalize the country responsible.

My favourite aspect of the film is the exploration of the very nuanced character of Rodchenkov, who on one hand perpetrated one of the largest sports doping scandals in modern history, but on the other hand became a gregarious friend to the filmmaker and whose testimonies put him at risk of assassination by Russian authorities. In particular I found Rodchenkov's interest in 1984 by George Orwell particularly fitting.

# Conclusion

A well-made documentary that explores the shady world of sports doping and feels like a political thriller at times.

# Overall rating: 7.9

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