<i>Icarus</i>: A Doping House of Cards Tumbles Down
In the new Netflix documentary, a filmmaker accidentally captures how one of the biggest scandals in sporting history came to light.
When he set out to make Icarus, the playwright and actor Bryan Fogel had one goal: to examine how easy it is to get away with doping in professional sport. An enthusiastic amateur cyclist, he was disturbed by the fact that someone like Lance Armstrong could cheat for so many years and never fail a single drug test. “Originally,” he explains in the film, “the idea I had was to prove the system in place to test athletes was bullshit.”
What actually, initially intended as a styleeffort to poke holes in the anti-doping system, ended up capturing the maelstrom of one of the biggest scandals in sporting history, while former anti-doping officials were and the IOC was pondering whether Russia should be banned outright from the 2016 Rio Olympics.
