The first year I walked out of that race and was in physical therapy for three weeks. These drugs don't make you any better of an athlete. I had some technical issues that weren't shown. You wound up finishing worse than the previous year at the Haute Route - an amateur race considered to be tougher than the Tour de France. I was worried about riding my bike 70 miles per hour down mountains in the Alps. As long as you're monitoring your levels and testing your stuff, there's really no danger.' They were telling me that 95 percent of the banned substances on WADA's list are not harmful. You're essentially taking hormones, you're taking stuff your body makes anyway. But the scientists I was talking to were telling me, 'They're not harmful. You don't know what to believe anymore.ĭid you have reservations about putting your health at risk for a cause? That is exactly what is going on in this world. The poster says, 'Truth is the new banned substance.' I feel like that is our daily news cycle. It also speaks to the political climate we're in. It was an honor that they literally created an award for us. Is it bittersweet that an award for the 'post-truth era' has been created? Sundance Festival created the Orwell Award for 'an era of post-truth, doublespeak and alternative facts' specifically for this movie. Netflix doc spotlights Russian doping whistleblower.You can fly, but if you get too close to the sun your wings are going to burn. When he finally got caught, it wasn't the science it was that he had made so many enemies in his sport. This guy could fly and he kept pushing and pushing and pushing. I felt that the Greek myth represented Lance's story, and the story of every fallen athlete. All these anti-doping agencies are on their soapbox going: 'Look what we've achieved, we've caught essentially the grand poobah of doping,' but it was his teammates' testimony that took him down. He had been tested 500 times in his career. What I was more taken by was that to this day, he's never failed a drug test. During the Armstrong era, the conversation was always: Did he dope? When he confessed in January 2013, I wasn't that surprised.

What made you decide to start this project?Ĭycling has been my passion throughout my life. presidential election.ĮSPN The Magazine recently caught up with Fogel to discuss the making of 'Icarus' and his role in unearthing unprecedented levels of state-sponsored corruption in sports. intelligence report cited the Olympic doping scandal as one of seven possible reasons Russian president Vladimir Putin allegedly ordered the hacking of the 2016 U.S. Under investigation by the FBI, Rodchenkov told his story to The New York Times in May 2016. In the course of making 'Icarus,' two of Rodchenkov's colleagues died under mysterious circumstances, and the doctor himself was forced to flee to the U.S. Ultimately, 1,000 athletes across 30 sports were implicated in Russia's state-sponsored doping program, and 111 were banned from last summer's Rio Olympics.

Grigory Rodchenkov, and stumbles upon one of the biggest scandals in sports history. Along the way, he meets the former head of Russia's anti-doping lab, Dr. The documentary begins with a simple premise: To prove how easy it is to beat a drug test, amateur cyclist Bryan Fogel would dope and see if he could get away with it. None of them will be competing under the Russian flag, thanks in part to 'Icarus.' The film, which debuted and won awards at Sundance, will premiere on Netflix on Friday - the same day the world's top track and field athletes will race at the IAAF World Championships in London. 'Truth is the new banned substance,' reads the tagline for 'Icarus,' a riveting docu-thriller exploring state-sponsored doping in Russia.

Icarus netflix