WOW!! This moved me. This shocked me. This made me realise I was very naive to drug use in performance sport, not just the Sochi Olympics but also the Beijing Olympics. Being involved in performance sport on a day-to-day basis, this documentary was very interesting.
The documentary starts with the director looking to utilise, and get away with using, performance enhancing drugs to complete a recreational cycle race (The Haute Route in the Alps), a race he came 14th in, previously clean.
the idea I has was to prove the system in place to test athletes was bullshit
What develops in the documentary, was the equivalent of knocking the first domino in a line of dominos and each domino that fell was bigger than the last. The director gets linked with a Russian doctor (a lab director in charge of anti-doping) who ends up exposing the state-run drug program of his home country, which hadn’t started in Sochi but had been running for decades previously.
The severity is highlighted when Russian anti-doping officials start to die under mysterious circumstances….something like an action blockbuster…but it is real life, and very worrying.
The exposure comes in November 2015, where the doctor ( Dr Gregor Rodchenkov) was implicated by the WADA (World Anti Doping Agency) and held responsible for the doping program. It is here where the documentary changes pace and like an action film they have to get Gregor out of Russia (alive) and then expose the story in the press. What makes the documentary, is the charisma and likability of the Russian doctor.
The doctor himself reported that his own mother would inject him at the age of 15 to improve his performance, so the relationship with drugs has been a life long affair, and I ask myself did he ever know any different – do the children coming up through the state-run program know any different? Have they known a life in sport that is clean…do they know what “clean sport” is?
I also went on to listen to two podcasts on the subject ( ICARUS – The documentary) including one hosted by Lance Armstrong. Lance himself did not belief that the exposure was real until the news story broke, the podcast is interesting and evokes thoughts in my head that during a 20 mile run I mulled over time and time again. If Russia can do this in sport for decades, what influence have they had on race wars in America, the USA election and also the Brexit….a true divide and concur of the western world.
It made the twenty miles pass quickly and may I say enjoyable? I would recommend this film/documentary to anyone…not just sport lovers but anyone. I also would recommend the following podcasts to gain a deeper understanding of what this means for the world today as the documentary only scratches the surface.
http://www.richroll.com/podcast/bryan-fogel/
Thanks for reading as always and thanks for your support. Please feel free to share and tag and help share the resource.
Run Long and Prosper
James
