Icarus

As everyone knows, Icarus had some wings made by his father, Daedalus, out of wax. As do the young, he ignored his father's advice not to fly too near the sun and...

Oops. "What did I tell you, son?" This is by Jacob Peter Gowy in the 17th century. It is credited to Gowy but is remarkably similar to one painted by Rubens. Mm.

Enough of fine art. I recently read a book The Rodchenkov Affair: How I Brought Down Putin's Secret Doping Empire by the eponymous Dr Grigory Rodchenkov. In parallel there is a movie Icarus. I watched the movie after reading the book, but more on that later.

Rodchenkov was a Russian chemist who rose to become the Director of Russia's Anti Doping Centre. By his own confession, his job involved not only research and development into methods for detecting athletes who were taking proscribed performance-enhancing drugs but also, on behalf of the Russian state, devising protocols to ensure that the country's athletes did not test positive for those drugs. He succinctly describes the process as "doublethink", referencing George Orwell's 1984.

The book, written after he defected to the US, is a detailed account of everything he did and everybody who was directly or (as was allegedly Russian President Putin) indirectly involved. It culminates in the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia in 2014. The planning leading up to it included the 2012 Olympics in London, which he describes as "the dirtiest in history", as a result of 126 negative tests subsequently, with reanalysis with later methodology, shown to be positive.

He describes Sochi as 'the biggest sports scandal the world has ever seen'. He recounts in painstaking detail all the preparations for a massive sting operation, the purpose to ensure that the event was an untainted success for Russia's athletes and the nation. The drugs taken by the athletes in the lead-up period; taking and storing clean urine samples before doping, to be swapped with on the day samples before testing; falsification of records. This is written with a straight face: he knows what he is doing, he knows the extent of Russia's state-sponsored doping regime, he just carries on doing his job with vigour and apparently without remorse.

Later, as the net closes in, he flees to the US and collaborates with Bryan Fogel, a film director and talented amateur cyclist, on what becomes Icarus. Fogel had been working on a film as an exposé of doping in professional cycling but he becomes fascinated by Rodchenkov's story and revelations. The film centres around interviews with Rodchenkov and, driven by Rodchenkov's Orwell fascination, the narrative is punctuated with quotations, starting with "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act". Rodchenkov's book, written after the release of the film, also makes frequent use of 1984: "There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad".

In the book's introductory note, Rodchenkov says "What follows is not an attempt to make excuses for my actions, nor to justify them. It strives to be one thing above all: honest. I will not shy away from giving a full and candid account of what I did, and nor do I ask you to forgive me".

Icarus won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2018. The book won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2020.

In the end, do I forgive him? No. Rodchenkov is clearly proud of what he did: the achievement of being the best in his field, and creating a spectacularly successful operation to cheat the world of sport, athletes and fans. His claim to be honest is belied by Orwell's truth/untruth observation; he created untruths. Factual yes; honest, no; truthful, no.

So, you ask, should I read the book first or the movie? Normally this is an easy question for me. Generally I would read a book then be disappointed in the movie, because a movie necessarily can't display the subtleties of the written word. In this case though, I think you could easily do it either way round. I read the book first but if I had seen the movie first I would have been stimulated to read the book, in order to experience the full detail of everything.

You could possibly read the book  and not bother with the film, but seeing Rodchenkov himself sheds extra light onto the stage. Where the book is dry, the film brings the person and his actions to life. Both were extremely enjoyable for me and I definitely recommend them, even to people don't particularly like sport.