In the summer of 2014, an amateur cyclist living in Boulder, Colorado decided to race in the Haute Route Alps, an 800km cycling event from Megève to Nice spanning seven days. Bryan Fogel looked up to cyclists like Greg LeMond and Lance Armstrong all his life and wished to emulate their grit, performance and athleticism. However, when Lance admitted to doping in 2013, Bryan felt the need to follow in his footsteps, document his journey and expose the loopholes in drug testing programs to the world.
His Academy-Award-winning documentary Icarus starts out as an absurdist comedy with close-ups of the filmmaker injecting banned substances in his buttcheeks as the head of Russia’s doping agency, Grigory Rodchenkov supervises him through video calls. The duo soon become friends and halfway through the documentary, Grigory blows the whistle on Russia’s doping program revealing the role of the Russian government in assisting its athletes to dope during the Sochi Winter Olympics.
What began as Bryan’s strange passion project morphs into a political battleground; Rodchenkov is flown down to the U.S. for his safety and put under a witness protection program as Russian athletes are stripped of their medals and their country banished from the world sporting stage. Icarus helped change the perception of sports documentaries for a large audience and introduced them to the malleability of the medium. While sports documentaries have always been around, Icarus’ Oscar-win would propel them into the spotlight and the consequent pandemic would mould them to suit the palette of a young demographic.
