cristianofisch Everything I expected. The only surprise was that Netflix produced. They are leftist, marxist, anticapitalist in almost every content. This one is an exception.

ViVaBraZil The good: It starts off with an interesting concept. Much like "Bigger, Stronger, Faster," an amateur athlete discovers that his role model has always taken performance enhancing drugs and every successful athlete does too, despite the regulations that claim to prohibit it. So he decides to take steroids under the supervision of the Russian scientist who dopes Russia's olympic athletes, which suddenly transforms the story into a political thriller.The bad: Everything goes downhill from there, it becomes evident that it is nothing more than orchestrated anti-Russia propaganda. And yes, I am American, a freaking patriot if you will. But I cannot stand the hipocrisy of depicting Russia as a villain for using steroids when every single American athlete dopes too. The documentary would have been much more honest if it had revealed the way sports are manipulated for political purposes. Everybody dopes, the only reason Russia was singled out is because the U.S. wanted to punish them for invading Ukraine, which is understandable, and had they chosen a different way to punish them it would have been completely justified. However, using the WADA to play politics harms the hundreds of athletes who make a living out of their sports, who in reality are on an equal playing field with other athletes in terms of drug usage. I will change my rating of this film only if in the future the director makes an equally revealing exposé on American doping. I won't hold my breath, because this was clearly part of the same political strategy that vilified Russian athletes and athletic organizations.

azureceo The movie started out like any other documentary, a cyclist ( Bryan Fogel) wanting to tell a story of how someone can cheat the system. So he hires the best of the best (Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov) , the director of Russia's national anti-doping laboratory. This movie goes ways beyond sports or or sport doping. It is a gripping moment by moment of events leading up to Russia being banned from the 2018 Olympics. It should be an eye opener for anyone who minimizes hoe evil Putin is. Winner of the 2018 Academy Award for best documentary

paul2001sw-1 Film-maker and amateur cyclist Bryan Fogel had a not-very-interesting idea for a movie. He would show how doping could improve a cyclist's performance - and how anti-doping labs were hopeless at catching the cheats - by using himself as a subject. The first part of 'Icarus' isn't so good, to be honest - Fogel is neither particularly charming nor informative as a character is his own film, and the narrative is spoiled when, in spite of taking all the drugs, he doesn't manage to bring home the bacon when racing. But for the second part of his mission, he had sought the help of the retired head of the U.S. anti-doping laboratories, who had some ideas about how athletes has dodged his testing regimen. When he got cold feet about being involved in the film, he suggested an alternative collaborator: Grigory Rodchenkov, the current head of the offical Russian laboratory.From the start, Rodchenkov seems to have a strange attitude to the project. You might thing he would be reluctant to show how his day-job is useless; instead, he approaches the project with a strange mixture of enthusiasm and business-as-usual. And then, as the film was being made, a scandal broke over his head. It turned out that, as well as running the lab, he was routinely helping Russian athletes to cheat his own test. The documentary project, as it happened, perfectly mirrored his normal working life. Quite why he was willing to participate, and draw attention to himself, is unclear; perhaps he just considered himself invulnerable. After all, he was usuallly not freelancing, but working at the direction of senior figures in the Russian state. Which made the scandal uniquely dangerous for him.The ending: Rodchenkov flees to the United States. He aids the authorities, but is separated from his family, and has perhaps good reason to fear for his own life. Russia gets banned from the Olympics, but the decision is at least partially rescinded; power and money trump justice. The film has a decided anti-Russian slant, and with good reason, but my fear is that the athletes from most other countries are little better (after all, Fogel was orginally inspired by the Lance Armstrong story), even if there's less in the way of official backing. In the end, the bizarre and flamboyant character of Rodchenkov makes the film, and a more interesting film surely than the one Fogel was expecting to make. But you couldn't call it a happy story.