You set out to make a film on doping by injecting yourself and tracking your athletic performance, a pretty gutsy move. What did it feel like to be on those drugs?
Bryan Fogel: I think that there’s a misperception that taking these drugs or hormones will all of a sudden turn you into Superman. The feelings, for me at least, were very subtle. What you’re really doing is optimizing your hormone levels, and the biggest difference for me was in recovery. I would train for three or four hours, and the pain and hard work of the training was all still there, it’s just the next day I was able to come back and do the same thing.
You wanted Icarus to show how easy it was to hide the fact that you were doping, and you approached a man you didn’t know to help you: the director of Russia’s anti-doping lab, Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov. Why do you think that Grigory agreed to help you?
BF: That’s been an ongoing debate amongst myself and pretty much everyone else involved in the production. The question still fascinates me. I don’t really have an answer. When he started working with me, we formed a friendship. We hit it off. He liked that I was an athlete and he was an athlete. He liked the filmmaker thing. He loves Los Angeles—he’d spent time in in the city back when he was getting into the science of testing and detection. So I think that was all fascinating to him. But still, when we were starting out, I went back to my team and said, “My god, I can’t believe that this guy’s helping me, what are we going to do about this? At some point I’m going to go to Moscow and show him the film and figure out what he wants to do. Maybe we can find him a job.” There were all of these discussions because I was concerned that what I had been filming would cost him his job. Little did I know then that I was basically dealing with the Russian Snowden and that this guy had massive secrets. But it certainly was a continuing vexing question for me. When he actually started doping me, for that entire year and a half, it was, “Wait, what are we going to do with this, I have footage of this guy in my kitchen smuggling my piss back to Moscow.” It was crazy.
As Icarus progresses, Grigory gets more and more involved in your quest and he takes greater and greater chances to ensure that your doping will avoid detection. And he does so with such glee. Where is that coming from?
BF: Look, Grigory is a really fun person. He’s got this great positive fun outlook on things and I think he was enjoying this idea that he could dope somebody and do all this but that I wasn’t a professional athlete so in his mind it was all okay because I wasn’t really cheating because it’s not like I was being paid. I think he was enjoying being filmed, being the center of attention, and I think we genuinely developed a friendship. At a certain point, I think he even forgot that there was this movie being made. And I mean, this is what this guy had been doing his whole life: doping and anti-doping. Certainly in light of all I came to learn, it’s not like he had a dilemma with helping somebody dope.
At what point, as Grigory advised you how to game the system, did you start to suspect that doping was happening on a massive scale in Russia—and did you suspect that he was in on it?
BF: I had known Grigory for about seven months when all of a sudden this German documentary came out in December of 2014 alleging a Russian state-sponsored doping system. Grigory’s in the documentary and WADA (the World Anti-Doping Association) launched a formal investigation. Of course, me being on the inside… I didn't know the extent of it but I knew that he was involved. The German piece didn’t have the hard facts but I didn’t have a reason to believe that a lot of it was not true. And of course, there’s this investigation going on. But I made a conscious decision that I didn’t want to become an investigative journalist covering Grigory. I wasn’t out there to unravel that mystery. My initial goal for the movie had been to show that the anti-doping system was a fraud; I wasn’t setting out to expose a Russian doping scandal or a WADA scientist in Russia. I decided it was better for me to maintain the friendship and allow the story to happen as it was going to happen.
When you went back and raced the second time, how was that for you?
BF: By that time the film had taken on a completely different trajectory. So we the filmmakers decided to really cut down my story. Did those drugs make a massive difference for me in the second year? Yes. A hundred percent. It’s just not reflected in my final number on the board. One day I had a mechanical problem and I lost another hour, another day I had a mechanical that cost me half an hour. Also, there were a lot more super competitive guys in that second race. And the fact is that I was never in contention to win, because taking performance-enhancing drugs does not turn you into a champion unless you’re already genetically wired to be a champion. But on a physical and physiological level, I saw a massive difference. The first year I couldn't walk for the next three weeks. I was shattered. The second year I came out of that race and the next day I’m flying to Moscow. The difference was night and day.
But all of that felt so secondary to this massive story. To spend time on me seemed like a total disservice to the audience given the fact that I now knew I was working with the guy who had mandated Russia’s entire Olympic doping program for the last fifteen years. And once you know what Grigory and Russia did, you know that with the right guys and the right supervision any professional athlete in the world can dope and evade detection.
About midway through your film, Grigory flees to the United States in fear for his life and suspicious deaths start happening back in Russia. How did it feel as you watched your project morph into something so much bigger than what you started with?
BF: It was a combination of excitement and fear. There was also fear of not being able to do the story justice and fear that I was sitting on what I considered a nuclear bomb of information and evidence. It was about six months before we went to the New York Times. It was a huge burden. It was like somebody hands you the last two matches in the world and tells you, “Hey, if you fuck this up, we’ll never have fire again.” I knew what this was for a long time before the rest of the world knew. When the NYT broke the story it was a huge sigh of relief because it allowed me to go back to making the film as a filmmaker and artist. From the time Grigory got out of Moscow in November 2015 to the NYT story in May 2016, I had been helping him find lawyers, I was vetting lawyers, conferring with the Justice Department and the FBI, compiling all of the evidence. It was an incredibly tedious and stressful time.
What was your greatest fear?
BF: Multiple things. One, I was very, very concerned for Grigory’s life, especially after Nikita Kamayev died and knowing the extent of what Grigory had actually done. I felt this tremendous burden to protect him. Then I was personally scared because I knew that Russia was aware that he was working on a film with me, that they had hacked his emails. There were actually programs running on Russian television of me and Grigory, with all of our correspondence and photos we’d sent each other.
The first thing Grigory does when he gets off the plane is he hands me a hard drive and he says, “Don’t lose this.” I say, “What is this?” and he says, “It’s everything.” I didn’t know what everything was at that point. But it was the 4,300 spreadsheets that (WADA investigator Richard) McLaren references in his report, those were all on that hard drive. The 1,100 documents, all on that hard drive. So it was scary. I was saying to different people on my team: “You take a hard drive, you take a hard drive, you take a hard drive.” I’m sending the hard drives to different locations, getting safety deposit boxes. It was very surreal because all of a sudden you’re just in it. In May I was literally the arbitrator between Grigory and WADA and the IOC (International Olympic Committee) and I was sitting in meetings with the world leaders of sport saying, “Here’s what they did, here’s the evidence, here’s everything. Here’s where you’ll find the bodies, the blood, the bullets. Go.”
Your film focuses primarily on Russia but to what extent do you think that doping is an issue everywhere in the world?
BF: I said to Don Catlin (who founded the first anti-doping lab in the United States), “What percentage of athletes do you believe are doping?” He said, “All of them.” I said, “Really?” He said, “No, but can you prove that?” What that means is that even if every athlete’s not doping, there’s no way to prove that they’re not. We learned that from Lance Armstrong. He got through 500 tests clean. He never failed a test. The most tested athlete on earth and they didn’t get him. And then you look at this Russian thing and go: Even if the science works, there’s all sorts of fraud along the way that can happen. So it’s not who’s doping or who’s not. That’s not my place to say. All that I know is that the system doesn’t work, and we have discovered that time and time and time again. And when you look at it on a worldwide level, you think how could you possibly police this in a third-world country? And in a first-world country they have the science and the money to outsmart policing.
Given everything that you’ve witnessed over the last couple of years, how do you feel about the future of sport?
BF: Having experimented with all of these drugs myself hasn’t really changed my outlook. I still love watching the Tour de France. I know the dedication, the hard work, the extraordinary gift that you have to have to achieve that level regardless of doping. Let’s say hypothetically that Michael Phelps has been doping. Hypothetically. Does that take away from his extraordinary accomplishments as an athlete? I view the war on doping in many ways like the war on drugs. It doesn’t work. It’s never going to work. The only way it works is if you believe that science stops, human evolution stops, that there will never be another drug developed, there will never be another scientific method developed, there will never be another way to make people stronger and faster, live longer and better. And so long as there’s millions of dollars on the line for athletes, so long as countries are paying $50 billion to host the Olympics, the most watched event on earth, we’re living in a land of delusion. You have an anti-doping agency, the world watchdog, funded with an annual budget of $20 million. It’s a sham, a fraud. You’re never going to stop it. Ever.
But the difference with Russia for me—and this is where the line got crossed—is that I believe in the concept of a level playing field. In the age of Lance, everybody was doing what Lance was doing, and he was still better than all of them so in a way it's fair. The Russians turned it into criminal fraud. It went so far beyond questions like: Can anti-doping work? Should sports be clean? Is WADA effective? All those things are secondary if you’ve got a wizard that is basically able to open bottles, dump out piss, thwart the entire system and commit crime.
Icarus focuses on Russian subterfuge in the international sports arena. Now the question of Russian subterfuge in the American elections is front and center. Any thoughts on that you’d like to share?
BF: Yes. On January 6, the FBI, CIA and NSA published a joint declassified report into the hacking of the US election. On page one it said that Putin did it in part because of the Olympic doping scandal. I have the exact language. “The report concluded that Vladimir Putin conspired to help Donald Trump win the presidency and ordered the hacking of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee in part as retaliation for the WADA investigation that led to dozens of Russian athletes being banned from the Olympics, which he believed was a US-directed effort to defame Russia.” So what our government agencies are telling us is that if Grigory had not come forth with this information… who knows? Putin spent $50 billion on Sochi. It was his pride and joy. Nothing is more important to him than sport, he reveres the sports stars of Russia. People all over the world love sports, but the difference is that in Russia sports has its own ministry. It’s actually controlled by the government. And Grigory exposed a spectacular operation that wasn't just Sochi, wasn't just London, it was all of it. There never was anti-doping in Russia. Never.
This is big, big geopolitics. The Olympics is a multi- multi-billion dollar business. The IOC are supposed to be protecting the Olympic ideals—play fair, be clean, be true—and what are they doing? The Games go to the highest bidder and then the country relocates people outside the city and takes away their homes to build Olympic stadiums. They did it China and in Brazil and in Sochi. They built the most expensive road in the world for Sochi. It’s a big operation all shrouded in this big ideal while there is spectacular corruption going on behind the scenes. Even the Sochi thing and breaking into the bottles—it’s every Olympics, it’s all sports. If Russia was doing this, then how did the US beat them? And then you look at Beijing and guess who won the most medals in that Olympics? China. And guess what Grigory told me, how he got the idea to swap the urine? He was at the Beijing Olympics and the Chinese were doing the same thing. The Olympics is the world stage for all of these countries to come together and flex their muscles and essentially be at war with their national pride. Putin wanted to boost Russia and Russian pride. And then Grigory decided that he was going to blow the whistle and came to the United States. And if you believe the FBI and CIA and NSA, perhaps Donald Trump is our president right now because of that.
Are you still in touch with Grigory? What do you think will happen next for him?
BF: That is a really good question. He’s under protective custody right now as a whistleblower. Two days after the NYT story broke, the DoJ announced that they’d launched a formal investigation into the Russian doping scandal. They have not decided what to do yet. You can imagine the politics behind it. And who exactly are they going after? The athletes? The coaches? The politicians? Putin? I don’t think so.
Are you concerned that with the closeness between Trump and Putin that they may try to arrange a swap of Grigory for Edward Snowden?
BF: That has been discussed and it is a real fear. Grigory is Russia’s Snowden. He has done as much harm to Russia’s government as Snowden did to the US government. There are calls now for Russia not to host the World Cup, there are cries of bloody murder that Russia should not be let into the next winter Olympics. The IOC is under incredible pressure. We’re concerned. I hope he’ll be okay. You want to believe that truth will prevail. I’d like to go back to riding my bike! But the truth is there’s a lot of sadness behind this story on a lot of levels. I love Russia. I love the Russian people. I think it’s an awesome place. And I think most people would say the same when they come to America. And yet somehow our two countries are caught up almost essentially back in the Cold War. You think, “What the hell is gong on? Do I have a beef against Russia? Absolutely not.” This stuff is so far beyond any of us on a personal level, it’s about power and big business. I don’t know what the answer is but I certainly don't have a knife in the fight. I’m just a guy who got into this story as a filmmaker and then did my best to uphold it. I felt that it had come to me and I couldn’t walk away from it.