Academy Award Winner Bryan Fogel Discusses Collision of Sport and Geopolitics in Russia
In November 2015, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) banned Russia in an unprecedented move after reports detailing a massive state-sponsored doping program in Russian athletics. This scheme, which was later found to have spanned nearly all sectors of Russian sport, was uncovered with the help of filmmaker Bryan Fogel in his Netflix documentary ICARUS. On October 30, Bryan Fogel spoke at an event sponsored by the Georgetown Lecture Fund about his experience in filming the documentary and discussed how sport functions as a geopolitical tool in Russia, its effects reaching far beyond the Olympics.
When Fogel was first conceptualizing the project, it was meant to be an exposé on how easy it was for athletes to take performance-enhancing drugs, a practice known as doping, without being caught by the existing safeguards. In order to get around the tests, Fogel reached out to Grigory Rodchenkov, the then-director of Russia’s National Anti-Doping Agency, for his expertise. At the time, Rodchenkov was in charge of overseeing the anti-doping tests for the Russian Olympic team at the Sochi Olympics in 2014, but agreed to help Fogel beat the tests.
As allegations of a state-sanctioned doping program began to appear, Fogel soon learned that not only was Rodchenkov responsible for helping Russia cheat at the Sochi Olympics, but that the Russian Olympic team had been cheating systematically for the past 20 years. Fogel helped Rodchenkov escape to the United States, where he currently lives in a witness protection program.
The story recounted by Fogel is a surreal experience that would fit perfectly in a political spy novel, but the details he gave of what has happened since the release of his documentary are even more fascinating. As with many things in Russia, sport has a political side to it—it is under central control of the Russian government, and for Russian President Vladimir Putin, sport is a way for Russia to illustrate its resurgence in the world. Fogel described how after Russia won the 2007 bid to host the Olympics in Sochi in 2014, the decision was made at the highest level of the Russian government to “win at all costs.” By the time Rodchenkov’s anti-doping laboratory was built, there was already a plan in place to systematically evade the tests with the help of the FSB, Russia’s intelligence service, according to the New York Times.
Because of the importance that the Russian government placed on sports, Rodchenkov quickly became Putin’s public enemy number one when he fled to the United States and publicly exposed the program. Fogel recalled how the private text messages and emails that he had sent to Rodchenkov were displayed on Russian state television, and how Rodchenkov’s family in Russia was repeatedly harassed by state security. What’s more, Rodchenkov continues to be a priority for the FSB. According to CNN, U.S. officials have told Fogel that several of the Russian diplomats expelled from the United States earlier this year were actually Russian intelligence officers charged with finding Rodchenkov. Given the recent poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a Russian defector, it’s possible to imagine Russia attempting to go after Rodchenkov as well, as reported by BBC.
Fogel’s documentary is a fascinating look into how sports and geopolitics collide, especially given the current attention on Russia’s election meddling in the United States. In fact, according to an intelligence report released by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Olympic doping scandal was seen as a “U.S.-directed effort to defame Russia,” which directly led to the decision to influence the elections in the United States. The implications of the doping scandal extend far beyond the Olympics, and its importance to the geopolitical dynamic of Putin’s Russia cannot be underestimated.