Icarus (2017)

Directed by: Bryan Fogel | 120 minutes | documentary, sports | Starring: Bryan Fogel, Dave Zabriskie, Don Catlin, Grigory Rodchenkov, Scott Brandt, Ben Stone, Richard Pound, Richard McLaren, Nikita Kamaev, Thomas Bach, Sebastian Coe, Vitaliy Mutko, Dan Cogan, David Howman, Jacques Rogge, Jim Walden

Documentary maker Bryan Fogel is a gifted amateur cyclist. Yet he never finishes in the top 10. How could that be? Is it because he doesn’t use doping? To find out what it is like to cycle with doping and how to fool the doping authorities, he is starting an experiment. With the help of a Russian doping authority, he stuffs his body full of illegal boosts and learns how to mask their traces. As a documentary maker, of course, he records these events on film.

All of this takes place around 2015, the period when large-scale Russian doping use surfaced for the first time. The director of the suspected doping lab in Moscow is called Grigory Rodchenkov. Let that just be the man who helps Fogel with his experiment. As Fogel stuffs himself with doping (and his results don’t get any better), Rodchenkov becomes one of the key figures in an international doping scandal. And all that under Fogel’s nose and camera.

The result is the Oscar-winning documentary ‘Icarus’. It’s the kind of documentary where everything happens during the shooting, from the mysterious death of a doping specialist to Rodchenkov’s flight to America. In between we see a lot of zoom conversations, we get an explanation about the operation of doping and how you cheat the doping inspectors, the inscrutable head of Putin appears again and again (as a likely driver of the Russian doping program) and we also see fallen American athletes such as Lance Armstrong and Marion Jones.

All this results in an overcrowded and somewhat nervous documentary, the outcome of which we have known for a long time. Still, the film is entertaining at times, especially when the slightly maladjusted Rodchenkov comes into the picture. For inexplicable reasons, he prefers to zoom without a shirt, likes to drink a vodka, is not really familiar with the concept of integrity and, in short, seems to have walked straight out of a Russian novel. His personality and his knowledge of the Russian doping world are the greatest assets of ‘Icarus’.

To really enjoy this documentary, you have to be able to go along with a large series of coincidences. An experiment by an amateur cyclist that suddenly turns into an international doping spectacle? An employee at the experiment who is in the news a few months later? It’s possible. But even then, this Oscar winner is just a little too full, too nervous, too messy and too predictable to really impress.