Meanwhile, Rodchenkov had become a political target. A short time later, the Court of Arbitration for Sports reduced the ban from four years to two. That certainly sent a statement, though in practice, the penalty was mostly for show: At the next Olympic Games, Russian athletes continued to compete in certain sports (like hockey). ![]() One cameraman, Jake Swantko, was allowed to shadow Rodchenkov, an exuberant, heavy-drinking character who tries his best to maintain some kind of optimism, even though it’s clear he’d essentially traded his freedom for a clear conscience.Īnd to what end? Shortly after the first film was released, the Olympic committee suspended Russia. During this process, Fogel obtained permission to keep filming. At some point in the process, he reached out to Rodchenkov and struck gold - the scientist had been suffering an ethical crisis for some time and decided to come clean - and Fogel reshaped his film around those bombshell revelations.įor the director, becoming the custodian of Rodchenkov’s secret presented an enormous personal responsibility: “Icarus” put his new friend’s life in danger, which meant that Fogel essentially had to help engineer his defection to the West, after which Rodchenkov was forced into hiding (for his own protection). “Icarus” was conceived as a “Super Size Me”-style stunt, of which Fogel planned to serve as his own guinea pig, taking the drugs himself and finding a way to pass. The point of his original documentary had been broader: to demonstrate that pretty much anyone could fool a doping test. In retrospect, it’s kind of amazing that Fogel got the scoop in the first place. ![]() Incredible and enraging in equal doses, the project plays like a tense spy thriller as Rodchenkov is assigned a security team and shuffled from one safe house to another, while enemies of the state - Sergei Skripal and Alexei Navalny - are poisoned with the Russian nerve agent Novichok. ![]() “The Aftermath” follows Russian whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov - former head of the Russian anti-doping agency RUSADA - for five years, embedding itself in the paranoid new reality that awaits him in the West after revealing inside knowledge of the elaborate conspiracy by the Russian sports establishment to cover up its use of performance-enhancing drugs.
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