He clearly realized that a film that started as the story of a cyclist interested in doping in his favorite sport became something much greater. Fogel wisely steps out of the spotlight and often allows Rodchenkov to tell his stories with minimal interference. Yes, it’s another story of Russian conspiracies and urine, although maybe not the one you heard.Īs “Icarus” gets deeper into Rodchenkov’s whistleblowing, it becomes less Spurlock and more Poitras. And Rodchenkov claims this systemic cheating was overseen and ordered from the very top, Vladimir Putin. Rodchenkov becomes an international whistleblower, revealing that he helped design and implement a system that not only gave the Russian Olympians a drug-fueled advantage but then worked to hide the regimen from WADA and the IOC. It turns out that Russia, under Rodchenkov’s watch, wasn’t so much anti-doping as anti-getting-caught-doping. He regularly quotes George Orwell, forms a playful friendship with Fogel, and even comes to visit.Īnd then “Icarus” takes a turn that you may have read about in the papers. Rodchenkov is a documentarian’s dream, the kind of larger-than-life character that typically exists only in Hollywood. Grigory Rodchenkov, the head of the Russian anti-doping program and an important figure in athletics in that country. ![]() To guide him, Fogel is put in touch with Dr. The first half-hour of “Icarus” centers on Fogel trying to increase his stamina and cycling ability through drugs, and trying to pass tests designed to stop such things at the same time. Fogel begins a drug routine, injecting PEDs, testosterone, and who knows what else into his thighs and ass. And as William Empson pointed out about the myth of Oedipus, whatever Oedipus’ problem was, it wasn’t an ‘Oedipus complex’ in the Freudian sense of that phrase, because the mythical Oedipus was unaware that he had married his own mother (rather than being attracted to her in full knowledge of who she was).“Icarus” starts as a first-person investigation of doping in sports-a sort of “Super Dope Me” if you will-in which director Bryan Fogel, an amateur cyclist, tries to game the system in the same way that Lance Armstrong did for years. Similarly, Narcissus, in another famous Greek myth, actually shunned other people before he fell in love with his own reflection, and yet we still talk of someone who is obsessed with their own importance and appearance as being narcissistic. (Or, as the Bible bluntly puts it, the love of money is the root of all evil.) The moral of King Midas, of course, was not that he was famed for his wealth and success, but that his greed for gold was his undoing: the story, if anything, is a warning about the dangers of corruption that money and riches can bring. ![]() However, as this last example shows, we often employ these myths in ways which run quite contrary to the moral messages the original myths impart. ![]() We describe a challenging undertaking as a Herculean task, and speak of somebody who enjoys great success as having the Midas touch. So we describe somebody’s weakness as their Achilles heel, or we talk about the dangers of opening up Pandora’s box. ![]() The Greek myths are over two thousand years old – and perhaps, in their earliest forms, much older – and yet many stories from Greek mythology, and phrases derived from those stories, are part of our everyday speech.
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