Icarus Reflection Questions

Hello class, welcome to my first post on the blog. Hope you enjoy!

1. One scene that made me turn my head was when the Russian athletes were walking in at the opening ceremony of the Rio summer Olympic games. The documentary showed them all smiling, waving, and excited to be there despite their tarnished credibility. There is a narration of Bryan Fogol talking over the scene, sounding defeated in a sense, that all of his and Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov’s work of whistle-blowing the entire Russian doping scandal seemingly did nothing. The scene continues on with the narration while it is showing Russian athletes compete in events and win various medals in the Olympic games. It shocked me that the Russian athletes were able to compete with the overwhelming amount of evidence that Russia had state sponsored doping practices going on.

This scene bothered and frustrated me because I watched most of the Rio summer Olympic games without any real knowledge of the Russian doping scandal. I watched the games with the mindset that there is no way the Olympics could be fixed or manipulated, it is just the best of the best athletes competing against each other. Instead what I thought was a fair and equal competition was just doped up athletes cheating. It wasn’t just the Rio games either Grigory admitted that it went back all the way to the 1960s for Russia doping their athletes. The documentary destroys the credibility of the Russian athletes, the Olympic committee itself, and WADA the world anti-doping association. It makes me feel I have wasted my time watching the Olympics because if it can be rigged in favor of a cheater, what is the point in watching them?

2. Something that surprised me was how I went into the film thinking it was going to be primarily about Bryan Fogol’s adventure of doping himself. His goal was to improve his amateur cycling to win an amateur cycling competition. It was interesting to see how he connected with Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, a Russian anti-doping lab director, who aided him in his doping experiment. The results of Bryan’s year-long experiment was overshadowed by a much bigger scandal. His experiment actually ended up being only about a third of the actual film.

It surprised me how the whole scope of the documentary shifted to focus on Grigory’s story. They meet by chance and their focus changed from helping Bryan improve his cycling to saving Grigory’s life from high ranking Russian officials. Grigory, essential a criminal to the world, placed all his trust in Bryan to help him get to safety. For awhile Grigory was almost prosecuted by the United States government. It surprised me how the film had various scenes that foreshadowed this massive scandal. There were numerous scenes during Bryan’s experiment that Grigory was seen doing or revealing questionable tactics at the Russian lab.

3. Some questions that remain with me are mainly about the scandal. How was Russia able the get through this scandal with no real ramifications? To my understanding none of the athletes have had their medals stripped, Russia has still been able to participate in the Olympic games, and it seems like all the Olympic committees have done nothing further about this despite the overwhelming amount of evidence. Another question I have is what has WADA done to improve the testing practices of athletes? Clearly what they were doing is considered ineffective by nearly every official and lab workers that make and preform the tests.

This film has left me feeling conflicted and shocked. I'm feeling conflicted because i generally enjoyed watching some of the Olympic events. However, now knowing about how all these politics and practices influence the games they just seem rigged. As I stated before the credibility of the entire organization is gone. The athletes feel the pressure that they have to dope to get to the top tier, just as Bryan felt the only way to win the amateur cycling race was to get to that next level that the top ten guys were on.

4. After seeing the documentary there are plenty of concepts that could be more researched in depth. One topic would be researching the WADA organization and their testing procedures of the athletes. I would be able to solve my unanswered question from the response I gave for reflection question 3. Another topic that would be worthwhile is to better understand doping and how it affects the human body. Or you could go the other route and research past major athletes that have been caught doping.

Some other topics I wouldn’t mind looking further into would have to be how other countries have handled doping and if there are other scandals out there that the public doesn’t really know about. Lastly, I would research about when doping started and the general history behind the practices. I would like to find out what made us start putting chemicals in our bodies to increase performance.