The Rich Roll Podcast - ICARUS: How Bryan Fogel Exposed The Biggest Doping Scandal In Olympic History

Episode Date: November 20, 2017

Last week I sat down with Lance Armstrong to explore his competitive drive for greatness, precipitous fall from grace, and path forward. Irrespective of your opinion on Lance or that conversation, his story leaves us all with an indelible question: Just how far will we go to be considered the best? Obsessed with this inquiry, Bryan Fogel decided to answer it for himself. Struck by the fact that Lance never once failed a single drug test, the avid cyclist, playwright, and filmmaker decided to make a documentary with one goal in mind: to prove the system in place to detect doping athletes was bullshit. Because what the world watches on its sports fields should not be taken for granted as truth. Icarus was premised on an audacious idea: Bryan would undertake an aggressive doping protocol, experimenting with a wide variety of performance enhancing drugs. He would observe the changes in his athletic performance. He would attempt to evade detection. And finally, he would extensively and transparently document the entire experience, sharing the whole endeavor on film. To guide him through the mysterious and byzantine process of doping, Bryan enlists the professional aid of Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, a renegade Russian scientist and then pillar of his country's “anti-doping” program. As they grow closer, it becomes clear that Rodchenkov is in fact the central figure in what we soon discover is Russia's vast and elaborate state-sponsored Olympic doping program – a program that can be traced to Russia’s highest chains of command, all the way up to Vladamir Putin. When the two realize they hold the power to reveal the biggest international sports scandal in living memory, Bryan's academic exercise in self-experimentation quickly pivots into spy thriller territory — a high-stakes and quite spectacular collision of politics, sports, espionage and danger more John LeCarré than Morgan Spurlock. Icarus premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, where it won “The Orwell” Special Jury Award and the first ever Audience Choice Award at Sundance Film Festival London. It’s been called a “game-changing documentary” by Variety and “The Best Non-Fiction film of 2017″ by the Financial Times and was acquired by Netflix in a historic sale. Bryan and the story behind the film have been profiled in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, Variety , USA Today, Newsweek, The Atlantic, and The Guardian. Bryan has also discussed the film on NPR's All Things Considered, NBC's Meet The Press, ABC Dateline, Charlie Rose, Late Night with Seth Meyers, and Breakfast with the BBC. An extraordinary portrait of self sacrifice in the interest of truth, Icarus is a gripping exposé that will forever color your perception of Olympic sport. But more than that, it's a palpable glimpse into the dark realpolitik of the global sports arena and the staggering implications it has on our already strained geo-political landscape. One of the best documentaries I have seen in recent memory, Icarus exemplifies the power of film to rewrite history. Today, Bryan joins me to share his fascinating tale. For the visually inclined, watch the podcast on YouTube. I sincerely hope you enjoy this exchange. Peace + Plants, Rich

What the film shows is what George Orwell clearly said is that sport is war without the weapons. And these Olympic Games or World Cup soccer, etc., are essentially just a place for a country to go to war with each other and assert its geopolitical power through sport. And these athletes are, in in essence gladiators for their country. And the case of Russia and this program that went for 40 years in the case of the Sochi Olympics, Russia has been using its sport program to assert itself geopolitically and show dominance and power. And if they can win in sport and they can win in Olympics, what does this say about business? What does this say about war? What does this say about military strength, et cetera, et cetera? And you look at that and then you draw the analogy to Sochi. The 1936 games in Berlin was one of the pivotal moments in the rise of the Third Reich

and of German nationalism and pride. And Hitler used those games to consolidate his power. And so we're seeing the replicating that in each one of these games where a country is using these games to basically assert itself on a geopolitical level. That's Brian Fogel, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, people. Happy Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, whenever, wherever you happen to be listening to this program. Hope you're good, doing well, feeling fine. As always, my name is Rich Roll. This is my podcast. Welcome to it,

the show where each week I dive deep with a wide variety of intriguing, inspiring, compelling characters to talk health, wellness, entrepreneurship, mindfulness, spirituality, and in the case of today's guest, documentary filmmaking, sport, and the wide-ranging implications of state-sponsored doping at the Olympic level. Before I get into it, a couple quick words about last week. Last week was a big one. My conversation with Lance Armstrong received more listens, more comments, discussion, and controversy in the first week of posting than any other podcast I've ever done. And opinions are divided. I predicted that. That's fine. I guess I would say that it wasn't my intention to be controversial. But of course, as I pointed out in the intro to that conversation,

emotions run high with Lance. He is inherently a divisive character. I'm not sure I was really prepared to be personally attacked or criticized for simply having a conversation with the guy, particularly as my approach was really to just better understand him, the situation he finds himself in, and to just get a glimpse of what makes him tick, what it must be like to be Lance Armstrong. But I get it. Nonetheless, I stand behind the conversation. It's fine. I'd do it again. Because no matter how you come down on Lance,

it is irrefutable that he is one of the most prominent figures in not just sport, but of our time. And the story that swirls around him is one that has not just impacted cycling, but really impacted culture in the most massive way, including the impact that he had on this week's guest, Brian Fogle. If you ride bikes in Malibu, where I live, then chances are you know Brian. He's a former competitive cyclist. He's one of the strongest riders in the area. You can find him out on the hills all the time. And Brian is a guy who was personally quite impacted by the Lance story.

His admiration of Lance Armstrong is, in fact, what led him to what he calls an investigative obsession. Just how far will we go to be considered the best? And as a filmmaker, Brian had this audacious idea to transparently document the process of experimenting with performance-enhancing drugs in sort of a Morgan Spurlock kind of way. The idea was that he would dope himself, he would observe the changes in his performance and see if he could evade detection and capture this whole endeavor on film as a documentary. And the idea behind it all was really to help shed light on this belief that what the world watches on its sports fields should not necessarily be taken for granted as truth. And so to embark on this endeavor, he needed to find a doctor,

somebody that could guide him through this process, this ordeal of doping. And he ended up hooking up with this renegade Russian scientist by the name of Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, who at the time was a pillar of his country's anti-doping program. But as they start to grow closer, it suddenly becomes clear that Rodchenkov is something different altogether, that he is in fact the central figure in what can only be described as Russia's state-sponsored Olympic doping program, a program that runs to Russia's highest chain of command all the way up to Vladimir Putin. And so what begins as this personal firsthand experience of experimenting with performance enhancing drugs ultimately pivots in terms of narrative towards what can only be described as

this really gripping, almost unimaginable, John le Carre, Jason Bourne-like thriller. This quite rare and rather spectacular collision of politics and sports. And when these two guys realize that they hold the power to reveal the biggest international sports scandal in living memory, kind of like all hell breaks loose. And what plays out is this amazing portrait of self-sacrifice in the interest of truth. It's an expose that will not only forever color how you perceive Olympic sport, but ultimately has staggering implications on our world at the highest level of geopolitics. It's an amazing piece of filmmaking. It's one of the best documentaries I've seen in recent memory

that demonstrates the power of this medium to literally rewrite history. And I'm thrilled to have Brian on the show today to walk us through what I think you guys are going to discover is an unbelievably mind-blowing story. glowing story. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately,

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To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay. Icarus, Brian Fogel. So Icarus premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this past year, where it won the Orwell Special Jury Award. And it was also the first ever audience choice award at the Sundance Film Festival, London. It's been called a game-changing documentary by Variety and the best nonfiction film of 2017 by the Financial Times. It was acquired by Netflix. That's where you can see it. Brian and the story behind the making of the film has been written about basically everywhere. The New York Times, the LA Times, Financial Times, Variety, USA Today, Newsweek, The Atlantic, The Guardian.

And Brian has appeared everywhere as well. NPR's All Things Considered, NBC's Meet the Press, Dateline, Charlie Rose, Late Night with Seth Meyers, the BBC, on and on and on. Today, I have the honor of sharing Brian's fascinating story, The Gripping Tale of Icarus, and the implications that it lays bare regarding how we think about the implications that it lays bare regarding how we think about sport, how we think about self-sacrifice, and perhaps most importantly, the broader implications of sport on the geopolitical stage, including, as amazing as it may sound, our most recent presidential election and this current crisis of truth in which we find ourselves mired in. So, without further ado, this is me and my conversation with Brian Fogle.

Thanks for coming up here. Were you followed on your way up here? Not to my knowledge. Are you sure? I guess if I was being followed, I probably wouldn't know about it. Well, it's like you say that in jest, but I was reading an article. I don't know which one it was, but you were doing an interview at like a New York hotel. And I'm sure this wasn't recent. It was probably right around Sundance, I would imagine.

But according to the reporter, you know, it looked like you were a little bit concerned that certain people were kind of keeping an eye on you. It might have been when I was in London. Maybe, yeah. Where they had some extra security around me. But I guess I feel relatively safe. Yeah. Has it been? I mean, is that something that you think about or you feel pretty okay with everything? between understanding the information that he had and the evidence that he had

and and are going to to the New York Times with the story which for me and for Gregory and my team really felt aside from the need to do that, but that it would also make it a lot more public and also in many ways make Gregory safe by bringing that information forward. So that seven-month period, I felt a lot of stress. but recently and since the release of the film I feel like the story's public so I don't know what would be gained to come after myself ultimately I'm a filmmaker

and worked in a journalistic capacity to bring the story forward with Gregory. But I personally am not the person who did this. Who would be in the crosshairs, yeah, of course. Well, let's unpack it. I mean, the movie is extraordinary. You did an unbelievable job. I was deeply impacted by it, And it's really quite something. Like it is quite a piece of work. Like you should be very proud. I'm sure you are.

And it's an exciting time for you. I mean, I would not be surprised if you got an Academy Award nomination for this movie. In fact, I would expect that to occur. So congratulations. would expect that to occur. Um, so congratulations. It's very cool. Um, and it's a really powerful story. So before we kind of launch into it, maybe we can create a little context for it. Um, I mean, it's really birthed out of your, your passion for cycling, which has been, you know, a huge part of your life, uh, for a long time living here in Malibu, you're a fixture in the Malibu cycling scene, and we have lots of mutual friends. And it's funny right before the podcast, you said you'd been to my house before I wasn't here, but you were riding with some mutual friends of ours. And that's, that's funny. That's like, you know, that's what it's like to ride a bike around here.

So tell me a little bit about your history with cycling. Um, well, uh, thanks a lot for the, uh, for the warm accolades and for me and the film, it's, um, it's and in Russia and you know far beyond the the boundaries of sport what the film essentially shines a flashlight into which is you know what Russia is willing to do to win and that transcends sport it It goes into, you know, winning at all costs and essentially without a moral compass in what those stakes are involved in what you're willing to do to win. So, you know, so that I am hoping that any accolades that get presented to the film will be exciting for me, the bigger thing for me is that it will make people see the film and hopefully open up a much deeper and broader conversation in this country and internationally on the subject matter that's in the film. And really, the bottom line is subject matter that's in the film and really uh the bottom line is uh russian uh russia's meddling uh not just in sports but in geopolitics um as far as my my cycling background um

yeah i mean i i kind of started when i was 13 years old i i grew up racing in color and, um, it's just has been in my DNA and I, and I got into cycling really because, um, um, five foot eight, um, skinny guy. And, uh, the reality was, is I wasn't going to be a football player or baseball player or basketball player. And when I briefly tried those sports, I quickly found myself ill-equipped to compete. And cycling is really such an individual sport and a very mental sport as far as the kind of pain threshold that you put yourself through. And so, I think cycling for me has really been my therapy through life. It's just been something that has kind of, I've always went back to and grounded me. And it's really my passion for cycling that started me on this journey that became Icarus and that ultimately became this film.

And so you end up racing in college, right? At Boulder? film and so you you end up racing in college right um boulder or you and then at some point you have like a big kind of career-ending crash yeah i had raced um i started my my first races were like 13 14 15 they had in uh uh in colorado these things called the Red Singer Mini Classics. And it was literally Jonathan Vaughters and Bobby Julik and all the – Hink Cappy eventually because he was over at the Olympic Training Center. And I'm trying to remember all the guys who were in those races. Chris Weary. I'm trying to remember all the guys who were in those races, Chris Weary. And yeah, so it was all those kind of guys of that generation.

And I grew up, you know, and I was racing for about seven years, really, really seriously. And when I was 19, I was racing Cat 2 and racing Junior. It was my, like, I was technically no longer a junior, but my racing age was still a junior. So I was racing both. And I go and I do this race called the Tour d'Abitibi up in Northern Quebec. And it's this very prestigious junior race. Most of the best guys in the world did it when they were juniors, international field.

And I did pretty well there. And the following weekend weekend I'm staying in Canada to do this race called the Festival International de Hull and it's pouring rain and I'm in a break with about 10 guys and there's about 5k to go and I'm doing the math and I'm going wow the worst place I'm going to get is 10th and who knows perhaps maybe I could get top three or something. And the guy, two bike lanes in front of me, clips a wheel because it's like pouring rain and people's brakes aren't working. So he starts going over the handlebars and the guy in front of me hits him and is going over his handlebars. And I'm watching this in slow motion and i and i eat his wheel in my mouth literally literally the wheel goes in your mouth literally going yeah literally in my mouth and i was probably

going you know 30 miles an hour or something like that at that time and uh the next thing i know i'm just in the middle of like a bush and my my immediate masochistic thought is to get on the bike and finish the race, which I think all cyclists or endurance athletes can understand. Like somehow, even though you're totally mangled, you're going to finish the race. Well, there's that rush of adrenaline, too, that clouds, you know, logic. Yeah. too that clouds you know logic yeah and and so i just remember i'm in this bush and and then i quickly realized that one of my uh i'm stuck in one of my pedals hasn't released and so i'm like going wait did i break my leg and then i'm thinking that maybe i like broke an arm and then i'm feeling my mouth and i rub my my tongue across my teeth and basically realize that my teeth are either gone or in pieces and shattered.

And I'm in French Quebec, no less. So needless to say, that crash was traumatic enough for me that I came back. That put me out for the rest of the season. I then came back the next year to try to race. Then came back the next year to try to race, and I just found that my mindset, that difference between taking those chances to be competitive, as anybody who's into the sport understands, were no longer there. And so I found myself constantly chasing wheels or opening up gaps that I shouldn't have opened up or, um, not willing to take the chances on a descent that you need to take. Um, and, uh, and so I gave racing a break, um, put down the bike for a few years. And then as I was probably about 23, I picked it up again and I still ride. Right. Yeah. And, uh, once that, that switch is flicked and you have that fear, like it's kind of game over to be able to compete at that level, right? Like if you don't have that balls out instinct to just gun it on the descent, you know, rain or no rain, then it's going to be pretty difficult to be able to be in the mix. Yeah, it really is. And for Icarus, when I came up with this idea that I was going to go do this,

the Haute Route in Europe, and I had read about in Velo News, they had this article a couple years ago talking about, like, the hardest amateur events on the planet. And one of them was like the cape epic and another one was um i can't even i'm trying to remember there's there's another one in europe but the one that they rated the hardest is this hope route and it's you can do seven days 14 days or 21 days if you're totally off your rocker. But everybody's basically doing seven days. And I read about this race, and it's through the French Alps,

and it's every climb that I've ever read about Alpe d'Huez and Mont Ventoux and Galibier and Madeleine. And it's like the seven hardest days of the Tour de France if you were to put it all together into one week. And I get obsessed with this idea that i'm going to do this race and part of that is going to be that i'm going to dope but the interesting thing about that is is that um in the back of my mind there was always that that fear of what am I doing? Because to me, um, uh, taking the drugs or performance enhancing drugs, whatever the hormones I wasn't scared about, I was scared about flying off my bike

going 70 miles an hour. And that was, uh, I think the, the biggest variable and in coming back to kind of just do these two races in a competitive context yeah where i was like i'm really just um what am i doing i'm too old to have an injury like this yeah no i get it well you do i mean the first time you do haute route is was that 2009 no that was um 2014 2014 and then you got like 14th yeah right so you did well like how many how many guys are in are in it there's 440 guys that year yeah so you're like you know you're right in there and then you have this idea i want to talk about the genesis of the idea that you're going to go back the following year but you're going to be you're going to go back the following year, but you're going to be, you're going to compete, um, after undergoing like a full protocol of performance enhancing drugs.

And you're going to document all of this in a film. So what was the catalyst for that idea? Well, that, that, that catalyst, um, and, and which was a whole reason in the beginning as I, as I set, uh, off to make Icar Icarus and actually named the film Icarus before I ever even picked up a camera. And the reason why is because I was looking at Lance Armstrong's journey and I likened him to Icarus. Essentially, this guy who just kept flying too close to the sun and too close to the sun and too close to the sun. And he finally just essentially got his wings burnt and plummeted to the earth. And the concept for me was I was looking at that story and going,

in the popular media, if you talk to anybody, they all believe that Armstrong had been caught. But he actually hadn't been caught. It was like getting Al Capone on tax evasion. And behind the he's been caught was actually a program in anti-doping that really hadn't worked. a program in anti-doping that really hadn't worked. And so I'm going, wait, it's the beginning of 2013, and here he is confessing on Oprah. But as he's confessing, he still to this day has passed 500 tests. Right, he never failed a test.

Never failed a test. Now, scientists can go back now and they can go, well, you see this anomaly in his blood passport, Scientists can go back now and they can go, well, you see this anomaly in his blood passport, and here he would be suspicious for erythropoietin use or whatever they want to look at. But the bottom line is that he had not failed a test. So I'm going, forget about Armstrong. What does this mean for the world of sport? for the world of sport that if the most tested athlete on planet earth isn't being caught by the science that's in place to catch him and ultimately as a society we're we're mad at armstrong but in flipping um you know that on its head should we be mad at the system that clearly is ineffective and leaves the athlete with the choice

to make rather than being so upset at the individual athlete for making that choice when ultimately the athlete wants to win and what is involved in winning so so i was exploring that and and i saw as i started long before I picked up a camera I started talking to all these scientists and one after the other would tell me that essentially you can get around the testing essentially you can still get around the testing regardless of of Armstrong's confession and that it was essentially this constant cat and mouse game. And many of these guys that I was encountering and speaking to said to me, yeah, we could help get you around it, but we don't want to be involved in it. But it was based on this kind of hypothesis that I had

that set me out on this journey because I thought it would be really interesting because we, that I had that set me out on this journey because I thought it would be really interesting because we, you know, had never seen on camera. And I think it came from both a personal curiosity, but also in looking at it in a journalistic fashion of how to kind of tell this bigger story that everybody's curious about what these drugs do or don't do. Anybody who's an athlete or an armchair quarterback, it's always a topic of conversation. And I was very curious, A, to see what the drugs did, and B, to explore whether or not this system worked.

And if it didn't work, and assuming that it didn't work, essentially presenting to society or anybody who's going to watch this film the larger question of the hey what do we want to do about this what can be done about this should we care should we not care and that was kind of the the the the the blueprint that i had set out and initially, uh, going to make Icarus. Right. So the inquiry from the outset is, is bifurcated on the one hand, it's like, what's it like to do all these drugs and what's going to happen if I do it and go compete? Like, how will I feel? Um, how is that going to impact my performance? Like let's document it and show the world what this is really all about.

And the second prong being, uh, all right, we know that the system's broken. Lance Armstrong got through, we know many other athletes have, but how broken is it and how easy would it be or difficult would it be for somebody like you to undergo the protocol that, that, you know, some of these other people have done and try to game it and get by, right? So the idea was that you wanted to have your blood tested and see if you too could be somebody who could pass these tests. Correct. Right.

So then it becomes like, is it so broken that this is easy? Or do you have to be somebody like Armstrong who has a tremendous amount of resources at his fingertips in order to do it? Well, I think what I quickly started to discover was that there are so many variables. the other, which is ultimately what leads me to Gregory Rechenkov, who's running the, at the time, is running the Russian Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory, which is really the anti-anti-doping laboratory disguised as the anti-doping laboratory. And what I found was that, you know, any kind of chink in the armor, one thing out of place, could essentially disrupt the whole system. So that, you know, if you look at it from like the Armstrong perspective of it, well, that game was always about how do you essentially keep one step ahead of the science and going, okay, we know that the tests that they're using for HGH essentially can only detect HGH within about a 12-hour period. So, we know if I take HGH

at this time in the day and I can, you know, and even if they show up for a test, I can, you know, I'm going to be okay as long as I have this time frame. We know that if I take this much of erythropoietin, but I set these different values and take this amount, that I'm not going to test positive. And so, you know, the Armstrong of it was always trying to stay one step ahead of the science. one step ahead of the science and in his case you know he had a lot of advisors as did you know his team as did other riders of that generation i mean the i think the amazing thing that um when they catch him we learned that leipheimer and hincapie and all of his other teammates had been doing the exact same thing as had that he had been doing his entire career. And these guys had never been caught.

So that is the one side of it. And then there's the chinks in the armor, and that's the Rodchenkovs of it, the Gregory Rodchenkovs of it. Meaning, if you've got somebody within the lab who's altering your samples or who's working for the Russian ministry or who is… You don't have to be one step ahead of the science. You don't even need to worry about the science. You're controlling the science. Because you're controlling, exactly. Yeah.

And you kind of launch into this, you know, on this mission to explore these two prongs. And there's a certain levity to it. Like I wouldn't go so far, like it's sort of been compared to Morgan Spurlock and supersize me. Like, it's not a, it's not like a comedy in that regard. Like, I feel like you approach it with a little more seriousness than, than maybe, you know, someone like Morgan would have, but that was really the exploration and the focus.

And then you meet Gregory Rodchenkov and we're going to get into who he is and the impact that he had on this story. John le Carre novel, like this crazy spy novel, you know, born supremacy type situation with gigantic geopolitical implications and this firestorm, this maelstrom of a scandal that suddenly you find yourself in the center of. I mean, as a documentary filmmaker, in certain respects, like looking at it completely objectively, like that's a gift. And it's also, that's what makes documentaries great when you go on this journey and you're open to whatever's going to happen and these magical things sort of occur and then you can follow that story and it becomes something else altogether. Yeah. I mean, it's certainly, you know, the, the film, once we got into the creative filmmaking process of it after, you feel that you were simply in a narrative thriller

that happens to all be true, and so it is a documentary. And that came from what I was truly experiencing during that time on a daily basis and emotional level. And so as we went back to kind of shape the film as looking at Paul Greengrass movies and Doug Lyman films. Yeah. It has that handheld. And, and, and, you know, and Errol Morris on the documentary side and Laura Poitras was Citizen Four and Man on Wire and so thinking about how to kind of like blend these worlds of this true story which is a documentary and the thriller aspect of what was really going on in my life and in Gregory's life

and the stakes that were involved but to craft kind of the narrative to bring you into that story and keep you engaged. And that was a very long process with my team from the music and the sound and the editing and how we put that together to have that, hopefully, that emotional effect. And it changed from Sundance to the release on Netflix right quite a bit after that quite a bit we um we had a the film was acquired at Sundance um and and Netflix um came to the table and for me um the Netflix of it um was the best option for people to see the film. Because we're in a kind of an era where it doesn't matter what your documentary might be.

People are conditioned now that they're going to see documentary essentially on Netflix, or they're going to go see it on HBO, et cetera, where the days of literally going to a movie theater when your option is, do I go see whatever it is, the new Star Wars, and that's going to be my $100 evening at the movie theaters, or am I going to go see a documentary, the majority of the population is going to go choose to see Star Wars. And so with that in mind, you know, the Netflix of it to go into 190 countries at the push of a button and have your film translated into every language that Netflix is, their platform is operating in, to me was a no-brainer because ultimately,

I wanted to see to it that the film was seen. So they acquired it at Sundance, and creatively, we had raced to get ready to Sundance when they let you know that your movie is into Sundance. You basically have like seven weeks. Yeah, and you don't sleep. And so we hadn't slept for the months and months leading up to Sundance to submit a cut to them. How many hours of footage did you shoot total?

Oh, it was hundreds, hundreds. But then bringing in the thousands of archival clips and how to basically craft the narrative around the footage that we shot, but then the archival plus bringing in CGI and motion graphics and recreating that lab, etc. So Netflix acquires and sit down with them and just say, hey, look, we think this film can be better. These are the things that I want to keep working on. And Netflix said, okay, sounds good to us. And so we kept working for four months after Sundance. It was like Sundance, it was like the editing had never stopped. We just went, you know, we were sleepless up until Sundance.

Sundance happens, that's two weeks. Sundance ends, and the very next week, we're just back at it like it never happened. But that four months, A, allowed two things. One, allowed for me and my team to have an audience already have seen the film. And as you see it over and over again, you become more and more critical as a filmmaker of going, wait, that can be better. That can be better. We can do this.

We can do that. And two, when you're able to then go back and work already knowing what is really working and where you feel like the movie can be better refined. And so that was an amazing opportunity that a lot of filmmakers don't have to come out of Sundance and then continue to be able to work on their film. And Netflix was incredibly supportive,

been an amazing company to work with. It's the best portal for you to be on by far. I mean, the number of eyeballs that you can reach there versus any other platform it's not even you know comparable yeah they're amazing so you're you're launching into this adventure and uh and you have this idea but you're gonna have to find the guy who's going to walk you through how you're going to do this performance enhancing protocol, right? Like who, you know, who do you call and what leads you to this guy, Gregory? Well, um, you know, we don't get into a lot of the detail in the film. We, we dangle the carrot without getting into the real backstory because, you know, you

only have so much time in a feature. But essentially, as I started out, before I even picked up a camera in this thing, and I'm talking to scientists, I get put into touch with Don Catlin. And I went after actually Don Catlin. I actually sought him out because I knew that he was a essentially the the foremost scientist in U.S. history and in the development of the anti-doping system. Right he ran the first lab. The first lab the UCLA lab and he did the first ever testing for the 84 Olympics in Los Angeles he went on to do the testing for the Atlantic the Atlanta Olympics he went on to do the testing for the Salt Lake City Olympics so this guy is widely considered one of the most knowledgeable

and foremost scientists in the world on anti-doping and and also laboratory operations so in the early days of coming up with kind of the thesis for the film, I reached out to Don Catlin and we started having lunches and he's in Los Angeles and talking by phone. And I, you know, told him essentially what I wanted to do, which was, hey, Don, do you believe that the anti-doping system in sports works? And he said, no. I said, do you think, you know, what are the probabilities of it ever really working? And he basically said, well, I think it's very difficult. And he went on and listed a million different reasons. And at the time, Richard Pound, the head of WADA, had actually just released a report.

And this report, which Dick Pound authored, also got into huge detail as to all the different fallacies of the anti-doping system and what it was facing in its reality to succeed on a global level. And so Don... reality to succeed on on a global level and so don didn't you also sorry to interject but didn't you also ask don like how many athletes do you think at this highest level are doping yes and so i'd asked don you know how many what percentage of the athletes do you think are doping and and and he said all of them and i said well why do them. And I said, well, why do you believe that, Don? He goes, well, prove it to me otherwise. And I said, well, how can I prove it to you, Don? He goes, well, you can't.

So he was looking at it from a perspective of not that everybody is taking performance-enhancing drugs of not that everybody is taking performance enhancing drugs not that everybody is cheating but anyone who's adequately motivated to circumvent the checks and balances can do so exactly but but but he was looking at it in in his personal experience and going hey i i caught i tested armstrong 50 times i never got him i ran the lab and i saw you know so he was looking at it on a personal perspective going hey uh every time i thought somebody was clean then something would come come down the line that they weren't clean and so i can't prove to you that they are clean unless essentially you're going to put an athlete into like a biodome system, have them under 24-7 surveillance where you're monitoring them every 8 to 12 hours.

So Don was very candid in his beliefs. Is he still professionally involved in anti-doping efforts? He's retired. He's retired. Well, no, he's retired. He's retired. And I think his willingness to speak to me also had to do with the fact that he was retired, meaning while he was still in the system on a day to day basis, it's very hard to which I think is also part of the yin and yang and the two-sided nature of this issue or problem is that a lot of people involved in it that even understand it are not going to go and speak against it because it's their livelihood. So Don originally says to me that he'll help me essentially design a protocol

and advise me on how to essentially get around the system. And in so doing... And why do you think he was willing to help you? Just curious? I think in the beginning and that changed i think he was i think he was interested to show firsthand um the fallacies in the system that he himself couldn't expose but as a retired scientist as somebody who had kind of spent his life, his life's work, trying to do something about it, I think he was interested in exposing also. Right, if you can shine a spotlight on this, then the narrative shifts from, oh, there's a few outliers like Armstrong who can get around this to, no, there's a wide gaping hole here that anybody can walk through. Exactly. And when I was approaching the film, I was approaching it that Armstrong was the haystack and not, I'm sorry, that Armstrong was, you know, not the needle in the hay haystack that he was the haystack. He just, he just happened to be

the best of his generation, but ultimately doing the same thing that, that most of the athletes of his generation were doing as well. Um, so, so I was interested in, in, in exploring that story, but on a global sport level and, and, and Catlin thought that was a in exploring that story, but on a global sport level. And Catlin thought that was an interesting idea. But along that came all these variables, which is, first of all, how are you going to get your samples into a WADA accredited lab? And that's easier said than done, because technically it doesn't matter if you're a professional athlete or an amateur athlete you can't just get your samples into a water lab because if you can get a water lab to test your samples well then anybody can essentially figure out how they can game the system if they're sending in their samples every day and going okay am i positive now am i positive now do i test positive now do i don't want that happening. Yeah.

And so there was a huge variable there of how you're going to get your samples into a lab. And as Don got further into kind of the- Sorry to interrupt you. All labs are registered with WADA. So you just can't do it. That's right. There's no lab that you can go to. That's right.

Well, I guess there was a lab you could go to you had to go to russia to find it but that lab does exist but uh so so don um says look i i ultimately can't help you i i don't want to be advising you um i can't prescribe you what you need and i don't want the liability of that if something were to go wrong or you were to be get you know injured or hurt or have a heart attack whatever that is and third of all i can't get your samples into a waddle lab um but there's a there's a scientist who i know that i think um might find this interesting yeah i got the guy and he connects me to to dr gregory rachankov and gregory at the time is running russia's uh anti-doping laboratory and this is now right about the time of sochi and we don't get into this into the film so this is

um march of 2014 basically he was just finishing or know, it was like he was actually at Sochi as we first started corresponding. And I approached him and I just said, hey, I'm a documentary filmmaker. I'm interested in discussing with you the fallacies in the anti-doping system. Don Catlin referred me to you. Would you be willing to kind of like talk to me? And I didn't tell him what I wanted to do at the time. It wasn't like, hey, this is what I'm going to do. Will you help me dope and evade detection? But we go back and forth on an email exchange. And he invites me after a couple months of corresponding. And we'd actually spoke on the

phone a few times. He invites me to go meet him in Oregon. And this is July of 2014. He's lecturing at this symposium in Oregon. And I make this decision that I'm not going to go up there with a film crew. I'm not going to spook him. I just want to go up there and meet him because I don't know at the time, is this the right guy? he gonna help me what you know what am I really getting into other than this is a Russian scientist who just did all the testing for Sochi he's clearly a man of interest and could clearly advise if he wanted to so I go up there and meet him we spend a couple days together and And we end up drinking, even though I'm training. But, you know, it's just what you do when you're around a Russian scientist. And I ask Gregory, I say, do you believe that an Olympic medal, a medal in the Olympics, can be won without performance enhancing drugs? be won without performance enhancing drugs and he looks at me and he goes I should believe I tried to believe but I do not believe that an Olympic medal can

be won without performance enhancing drugs across the board yeah any sport and then he pauses he goes I don't know maybe I'm a bad man. And what do you make of that? And I, and literally it was okay. What do I make of this? And he agrees to help me on this journey after this conversation. I tell him what I want to do. And he says, I like challenges. This sounds interesting. You know.

And you told him you were making a film. Yeah. sounds interesting you know and you told him you were making a film yeah and uh which you know of course was kind of surprising in the wow this guy should not be doing this this is against his his job this is against wada code the world anti-doping agency code um and you shouldn't be doing this yeah unlike catlin he's gainfully employed he's exactly employed by this he's not exactly and unlike catlin you're still in the system this is still your job um but he agrees to help me because we kind of formed this this trust this relationship and i say and at the time i even said hey look you know anything we film when the movie's done time I even said, hey, look, you know, anything we film, when the movie's done, I'll show it to you.

And we just kind of just hit it off. And so, he agrees to help me. And about six months later, this is July 2014, I then start speaking to him. And this is where the film picks up. and this is the first time we see him in the film on skype and it's the first skype conversation i've ever had with him as well and there he is and i'm ready to start doping and literally as i'm getting ready to start doping this german television uh special kind of like a 60 Minutes, comes out. And this German reporter who had been investigating Gregory in the lab comes out with this scathing TV program alleging that Russia has a state-sponsored doping program. And that Gregory Rechenkov is essentially one of the very, very key, key figures in this program. And so this news piece comes out right as I'm literally starting my doping program.

And so Gregory is under investigation the entire year that he's advising me how to dope. So he's under investigation while at the same time he's coming to Los Angeles and helping me smuggle my urine back to Moscow I'm in myriads of Skype calls with him where he's advising me on my protocol and and what? Happens is over this year. We truly truly form a friendship and as this investigation is going on, I'm quietly behind the scenes, which I don't get into in the detail of the film, but I'm going and interviewing all these guys that are investigating Gregory and asking them, none of them realize that I know Gregory none of them realize that I'm doping but I'm just asking them as a documentary filmmaker so with these allegations against Russia proved to be true what does this mean do you think you know uh that this happened what do

you think is Gregory's involvement in this what you know so I'm coming out gathering all as a documentary but but what i'm doing is i'm and and my team is that we are essentially planting kind of all the seeds should the other part of this story turn into something a lot larger i see so and you're already aware that this pivot might be at play myself and my producing partner dan kogan with impact partners and my my editorial team and everything we were we were very we didn't know how big it was going to be but clearly as I come out of Oregon and I'm doping and this investigation is going on I mean I was I was very mindful of the fact that there was an investigation going on but from a narrative focus in the film I couldn't rely on that I had set out with a hypothesis that the anti-doping system has lots of problems.

I'm going to show firsthand what it is to dope, how to evade detection, how much better I get. And I have this Russian scientist doing this, and he shouldn't be doing that to begin with. And that, to me, would make a decent or a compelling documentary in and of itself. I mean, that worked for Morgan Spurlock and supersized me. And in and of itself, I thought that that was going to be compelling. But I also knew that there was another story unfolding. And there was an investigation going. And that Gregory was being focused on

and so when you watch that film every time we see those skypes i'm always then talking about the investigation what do you think will happen and then you know we we cut to somebody maybe commenting on it so we were we were very aware that there could be a much bigger story there but it i wasn't going to put all my eggs into that basket so i so during that time i was essentially continuing to make the movie that i was setting out to make that that my uh producing team and my investors had come in based on that hypothesis, while at the same time, I'm investigating and making sure that I'm prepared should this other thing develop with Gregory that turns out to be, as it turned out to be, you know, a hundred times bigger than I think any of us could have imagined at the time.

The fact that he was under investigation and this 60 minutes type show airs right at essentially the outset of your involvement with him in terms of him helping you figure out how to dope makes it all the more amazing that he would agree to do this. And I know, you know, you've thought a lot about this, and it's not sort of expressly addressed in the movie, but looking back, like, why do you think that he jumped on board to do this with you? Because in the movie, I mean, the guy's like a gift for a filmmaker. I mean, he's so, he's got charisma, he's funny, he's gleeful,

like there's an enthusiasm and you know, the, the bond between you guys is really palpable. And I think that really anchors the emotional core of the story, which, you know, it's great for you as a filmmaker, but it still begs the question, like, why is he doing this? Well, he had a bigger story to tell. And I think as our trust developed, he knew that unlike this German reporter that had essentially broke the first piece of the story, that we had a friendship and that I was not going to stab him in the back. I wasn't out there to exploit a story. And he had went through a lot of kind of moral conundrums. You know, first of all, conundrums. First of all, I think we have to look at how the sports system in Russia works, which is unlike the US or most Western European countries where sport is kind of privatized.

Or let's say you're playing on the basketball team. Well, here you're playing for the Los Angeles Lakers and you're being paid a salary for the Lakers. In Russia, you're playing for the ministry. You're playing for the Russian government and the Russian government is writing your check. And essentially every single professional athlete in Russia, like it was during communism and as it is today, are essentially government employees. You're essentially an athlete for the Russian government. And Gregory was an employee of the government. And he came up in that system that that is essentially the Russian government is in charge of sports and the ministry, the sports ministry is a part of the Russian government. part of the russian government so you know he had grown up in this system but this is how it was done and i think that that as the years went by and the ass got bigger and bigger um he saw himself as um as a disposable cog in that wheel.

And his career, which we don't get into in the film in detail, is there were many times where he was forced to sacrifice an athlete, essentially where the athlete would be reported positive because if nobody tested positive, well, that looks like Russia's up to something. Right. Yeah, it's not kosher. So they're going to have to throw somebody under the bus every once in a while. That's a huge part of that whole program.

So he's dealing with this ethical conundrum that he's constantly having to throw athletes under the bus that believe that he's protecting them. That trusted him, too. And that are under the belief that they're going to undergo these protocols and they're going to be taken care of. That's right. And so there's that going on. The development of the bottle-swapping system, I think he came out of Sochi and his willingness to start working with me

was that he had believed that this system had reached its logical conclusion. And maybe explain the system a little bit about what happened in Sochi so people understand or haven't seen the movie. Prior to Sochi, the Sochi Olympics, the game for him and the rest of the anti-doping world, I guess you could call it, was always the cat and mouse game of the science. So in Gregory's case, he's a scientist and a brilliant scientist, and he's developing tests to catch dopers, cheaters in sport.

Well, at the same time, he's developing the anti-venom to his own tests so that the russian athletes are getting away while other athletes around the world are being caught through the methodology that he created and that's you know full you know which we get into the film of orwell and double think of essentially you know uh being both sides of the same coin right but the the anti-doping establishment in russia is a doping establishment exactly and it's and it's and the and the and it's only a front for a doping operation to pretend to be an anti-doping operation now that to him was the world that he knew and what was always that world. But what began to happen, it was no longer about the science.

It was just purely about fraud. And what Rush had figured out how to do was how to break into the urine collection bottles that are the benchmark, hallmark, whatever you want to call it, of the anti-doping system, meaning the athletes give a urine sample, they divide their sample between these two collection bottles, an A bottle, a B bottle, it's this glass bottle, and they have this top on it, and this top is kind of like Fort Knox. You cannot get into it. You can only break the top for the testing,

and the B sample stays in storage for the next 10 years should they ever need to go back and retest it. So Russia, with the help of the KGB, the FSB, figures out how to break into these collection bottles. And in so doing, they are able to defraud the entire anti-doping system because now they don't need to worry about gaming the science. They don't need to worry about, hey, did this runner, you know, stop taking X drug seven days before competition and what amount that they were going to take and how to mask the steroids within the within you know that athlete um now it was hey you can take anything you want and we're going to just

swap out your dirty urine and put in clean urine in its place so and the lengths that they went to to the machinations behind how they actually executed on that planet. Sochi as demonstrated by this incredible motion graphic that you guys created is unbelievable. Like that truly is out of a spy novel. It is. It's like a, it's like an ocean 11s, uh,

ocean 11, uh, heist. And they had figured out even in the construction of building this laboratory in Sochi, how they were going to game the system. And so this was no longer about science or the doping or the anti-doping. Now his career was essentially, as he said, he was their doggy bag. He was the guy that was out there to pick up the poop and clean you know, and clean up the mess.

But it wasn't about him really being the scientist anymore. And he viewed that this system had reached its logical conclusion, that you couldn't continue in such a brazen manner and that it had just gotten out of control. and that it had just gotten out of control. And the bigger thing about that is out of the Sochi Olympics, as Russia wins 33 medals, the highest medal count, and they win 13 gold, the most gold of any country, national pride soars, Putin's approval rating soars,

and he, two weeks later goes uh into ukraine and fueled by those approval ratings right and and brazen you know in his in his right to do so right and goes in to try to um you know uh take back a part of ukraine and uh and and gregory felt in personally responsible for this he felt that that his success in sochi to which he had been awarded um the uh the medal of friendship by vladimir putin that's the highest honor that you can get and he literally got a medal of friendship uh from vladimir putin uh congratulating him on his success at sochi meaning if there's ever any doubt despite the uh russian denials to this day that uh they knew nothing about this here gregory is awarded right the medal of friendship says that he doesn't even know who the guy is, doesn't know his name. Of course, that's not true.

Of course. I mean, I think there's a couple sort of observations on that. I mean, the first is, you know, I think it's important for people to understand that, like, Gregory, you know, he'd been violating what we would perceive as a moral ethical, you know, code all along. But his sort of dividing line or his line in the sand was just a little bit further down right like he was okay like he grew up as a elite track and field athlete his mother was injecting him with steroids when he was 15 like

this is his reality right and this is the reality of sport in russia there was no dilemma for him until it reached that point where the fraud became so pervasive. And he actually wasn't performing work as a scientist anymore and more as like an errand boy of like, you know, like three card Monty, you know, almost to just hide these samples and stay one step ahead of of of WADA and the IOC. That's right. And, you know, I think the amazing thing is, regardless of the conversation that might want to be had on Gregory in the sense of, well, he perpetrated this fraud, he's complicit, et cetera, he had to look at the extraordinary risks that he ultimately took to bring this story public.

Had he stayed in Russia, there is no doubt that he would not be alive today, as witnessed by the two other guys that perished with this information. One of which was in conversations with David Walsh. That's correct. On the eve of having a quote-unquote heart attack, right? That's right. That was Nikita Kamayev, who was running RUSADA, the Russian anti-doping agency, and he was involved in the conspiracy.

And he was involved in the conspiracy. And when this report comes out that Gregory flees Moscow and essentially escapes to Los Angeles, Nikita decides that he's going to tell his side of the story and what happened to David Walsh because all these guys have been forced to resign. They've been pushed under the bus. They're already being labeled as the bad guys by the ministry, even though they were essentially the employees and following orders. So Nikita decides that he's going to do that and makes a plan to meet up with David Walsh. For people that are listening, he's the journalist who basically chased Lance around forever.

he's the journalist who basically you know chase Lance around forever yes he's the guy who wrote what was it LA he wrote multiple books on basically trying to expose Armstrong and he's the journalist the Sunday Times journalist who the Stephen Frears film the The Program, is ultimately about basically his hunt for Armstrong and how he essentially gets Armstrong. And anyway, so Nikita had been speaking to David Walsh, and before they were able to meet, he dies at age 52 of a heart attack. In Gregory's mind, this was not a heart attack at all, that this was a purposeful death. This was essentially a murder. So, yeah, I mean, the stakes were very high, but Gregory's decision ultimately to come out and be a whistleblower and the extent that he went to

do that i think are are pretty extraordinary because he could have come to los angeles and kept his mouth shut or he could have just said a little bit or he had multiple options but or he could have disappeared on you or he could have disappeared Or he could have disappeared on you. Or he could have disappeared, right. He could have came here, got here, and vanished. But the fact is that he wanted to tell his story, and he wanted to blow the whistle. He wanted to bring this evidence forward. And I became the guy that he entrusted to help do that. And myself and the team essentially brought on, you know, Russian translators, people that could

help us archive all the evidence, people that could help us create spreadsheets and documents, because everything was in Russian, and get this to a place that we could bring this story forward. And at the time that the story breaks and we bring it to the New York Times, which is in May of 2015, I couldn't have imagined the current political climate. I couldn't imagine that, you know, the current U.S. administration, that there would be charges of Russian meddling and interference in our election, all these kind of political events that have transpired in the last year, that as was deep into editorial um on the film and with this story um that shows um what russia is willing to do on a global level and how

how intertwined all of these things are When you understand the context around Putin going into the Ukraine, the idea that Olympic medals are just sport gets thrown out the window. geopolitical implications of what it means to, as a country, to be successful at the Olympics and how that can embolden and empower a leader of that kind, of that stature as Putin. And where does it go from there? And I want to get into the election meddling and all that. We're jumping all over the timeline. I want to get into, I think we should should should we go back and just talk about what the doping protocol was like and what happened through that sure yeah in uh in regards to uh russia or just in i want to sort of track um your experience on this doping protocol and then like what happened to you personally and then, and then get back into like Gregory and the larger story. Well, I, uh, I had been on a protocol, um, for about nine months leading up to this hope route.

And Gregory was advising me what to take and when to take it and how much he came to Los Angeles. He smuggles back all my frozen urine basically so he can test in his laboratory my washout period essentially you know at what point will I be clean how much can I take what exactly can I take can I not take to avoid detection and and I go and I do this second race in the film I don't get into the specifics because I I technically don't do as well but there were a lot of variables I had had a crash I had a flat tire my electronic shifting broke on a day and I lost an hour but I I truly, um, had was recovering, which was pretty, uh, amazing in

regards to all these hormones that I was taking that, um, on a performance enhancing level. Um, this stuff works. I mean, I was, I was recovering. I wasn't faster. I't you know a different athlete but i was able to go out and put in a uh an extraordinary effort and beat myself you know uh to a pulp but the next day i was recovering a lot better than i had um without um uh the peds and um so i and it was basically epo hgh and testosterone yeah epo hgh testosterone hcg to supplement the testosterone we're going to go off of that thyroid to increase my metabolism metabolism, DHEA, all sorts of different vitamin injections, folic acid, B12, combination of different vitamins that I were doing. I'm trying to think what else I took.

Yeah, that was... And that went on for how long? For about nine months. Nine months. Nine months. And, you know, off and on, and then we'd taper and figure out kind of how to do that. And I was getting my blood tested to build a biological passport for myself. And so I was kind of trying to do everything that I could to create kind of what this would be like had I been being tested by WADA. And Gregory is basically saying, I'm going to figure out the testing. We're going to

get these vials of blood back to my lab in Russia. And that's where we're going to do the testing. Yes. Yes. We're going to get my, my urine back to Russia. And then, and then I'm going to bring him all my urine from the second race, the whole route to, uh, which I did bring to him, uh, in, in Russia after the second race. And he was then going to test to see if in fact I was clean, uh, or not, if I was positive or not. And in everything that he was building before he basically is forced to resign from the lab and this whole investigation breaks, it was looking like I was, would have feasibly evaded positive detection.

And your experience of being on, you know, being on the protocol, protocol was that like was it what you expected or was it different than what you expected like clearly it works but it didn't make you feel like superman when you were out training and it didn't work it wasn't like a magic bullet in this hope route race you had all these other challenges i think setting aside the mechanicals and all of that though there were like your i think you said your last day, you were just crushing it. You weren't able to like, just feel great every single day. Had the race gone on another week or two, maybe you should have done the 21 day for that. Yeah. I mean, it's funny because as I, as I finished that race, uh, the second time and, and in the first year that I had done it, um, I was was blown apart i mean i couldn't i couldn't walk

for a couple weeks after that race i mean i i had uh i had developed some pretty severe achilles tendonitis i'd had hip dysplasia i mean i was just blown apart going into that race in seven days and even though i had been training uh you know before that it's not nobody's walking into that thing unless you've put in a lot of time on the bike and um but physically i was blown apart and the second year um by the time the last day comes around i actually finish with the leaders like i'm in like the the group the guy wins and and one other guy's a few minutes ahead but then I'm just right in the chase group on the last day and it was uh and I came out of that going wow if there was a day eight a day nine a day ten I was I was starting to make up this a lot of this time

that I lost I certainly would have never won the race but I think i probably would have ended up you know had nothing happened i probably would have been 10th and had the race continued for another week who knows maybe i would have jumped up to like eighth or something like that and and knowing what you know now uh having immersed yourself in this world do you i mean do you think any of the other guys that you were racing against were were doping i, this is an amateur race. In that race, yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Because they're amateur and because the system was not well monitored there.

And the strange thing about sport is I think so much of it is just for the personal glory. just for the personal glory. You know, it's hard to understand, but, you know, as amateur athletes at that level are incredibly competitive and very serious. And especially anybody who's going over to Europe to go do a seven-day race through the French Alps and leave their families and go train hundreds of hours on their bike, alps and leave their families and go train hundreds of hours on their bike um i think is a lot the same mentality of guys who will want to win at all costs it is weird though like you know it's not your profession you're not making you know it's it's just i can't fathom doing that

and yet i'm not naive and i know that there are a lot of people who are doing that and it wasn't there one guy who holds all kinds of strava records all over the Alps and the Pyrenees? So the guy who actually won the Haute Route, and I think he's won it five years in a row or something. His name's Peter Pooley. Nice guy. And if you look on Strava, I don't with the e-bikes and stuff what may or may have not changed but this guy essentially holds the kom up every single major climb in the alps the pyrenees the dolomites and if you scratch into his background he was actually he's french

he was in a couple tour de frances got caught for doping and instead of serving his sentence he retires and goes become becomes a cycling ambassador for thailand and lives in thailand and is like sponsored by singapore yeah and by the and by the government of thailand to be their cycling ambassador um and this guy has been killing the the whole route that these are all the climbs that are on all the grand oh yeah i mean great oh yeah this this guy this guy's got times up these climbs to rival froom and whoever close to it yeah he's he's of that caliber um and uh but i mean what a gifted half lead i think he won again this year i mean and that's the thing that I think a lot of people forget in this argument is I don't know whether or not Peter Pooley was or was not taking

substances, even though, you know, if I look at his past, you could certainly make an argument that he was or is. But on the other hand hand it certainly doesn't negate that this guy is an extraordinary athlete all the drugs in the world were still not going to make me peter pooley and having and having experienced that firsthand having gone through the protocol like does that does it change how you look at someone like lance armstrong and you know the seven tours i think i think look first of all i think that um that cheating is wrong if you're going in and subscribing to a set of rules so these rules are put in place um because it's trying to create um level playing field, at least in the regards of, hey, you're not going to take something that I'm not going to take that can give you an

edge over me if all things are considered equal. And that is kind of the ongoing battle of where, um, on an ethical or moral level, um, I, I very much support clean sport. I think that if you're going into, to race in the Tour de France, I'd like to believe that everybody is, is clean and may the best man win or the best genetic mutant, uh, win. and may the best man win or the best genetic mutant win. And then the flip side of that is you have the constant game of science and human evolution and medical evolution and technology, which is never going to change. There's always going to be another substance out there.

There's always going to be another experiment, and all you've got to do is pick up any science journal every day, and there's been countless articles written about the athletes of the future. And it's the same kind of reality that we're facing, that my iPhone 7 is now obsolete because there's an iPhone 8. Things are going to get really weird pretty soon. We're on the cusp of all kinds of insane breakthroughs and this gestalt of technology, you know, is only speeding up. And so, you know, when you look through the lens of,

you know, genetic engineering and being able to, you know, select the expression of certain genes, you know, where are we going to draw the line in terms of what's kosher and what's not? And what does it mean to be on an even playing field? Well, this conversation is going to continue. It's never going to stop so long as there's hundreds of billions of dollars at stake in the world of professional sports. And I think that the conversation is going to have to continually evolve because it's the reality of it. I mean, right now, if you've got a couple hundred thousand dollars in the embryo stage, you can change the eye color of your kid.

You can see to it that your child is going to be six feet instead of 5'8". You can go in and change the sex of your baby, essentially. And why not create a child who's going to naturally produce more EPO in their system than the ordinary kid, or whose lungs are going to be more efficient at uptaking oxygen or what have you. You can create this athlete. And is that okay? Is that not okay? And if you read in medical science journals, that technology is either there right now or it's on the cusp of being there and so you know we're heading into a whole other future that is really outside of kind of I think what the the creators of the anti-doping system in sport and water could have ever predicted because we're heading into a land of unknowns far beyond

the pharmacology of it. We're going into, you know, actually going in and being able to modify your genetic makeup. And that's going to present a whole other set of problems, conundrums, whatever you want to call it, as sport continues to evolve. It is weird that, you know, understandably, there's a rule you cannot take testosterone exogenously, like that would be a violation of this protocol. But if you were to take some kind of Ayurvedic herb that stimulates your body's ability to naturally produce that that's okay well right i mean you're you're you're dealing in

a world of gray areas which was under the original film that i set out to make, I was going to explore these gray areas, these ideas of, okay, you can have a, if you've got $15,000, you can be sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber, tent essentially, where your body is going to naturally create more erythropoietin, but you can't inject erythropoietin. You know, and I could go on for hours about all these kind of gray areas. But ultimately, it's, I think, just human nature that we want to be the best at things. And if you're competitive in anything that you do, whether you're a real estate developer or, you know, the list goes on and on and on. You're a businessman, you're a software programmer, you're always trying to figure out how to be the best at that. And along with that in sports comes, you know, trying to figure

out how to have that extra advantage. And it's not always about taking drugs. It's all sorts of other variables that come into place. Yeah, and I think that it extends beyond. Like if you presume the testing agencies are well-intentioned and that this system is just inherently flawed because it can't keep up and technology is moving too fast, that's one thing. But you also have to kind of take a look at the interplay between WADA and USADA and the IOC and, you know, the FBI and the DOJ. Like, there's this cabal, this sort of like, you know, relationship that exists between all of these that,

you know, it's just not on the on the level right like and how like i'm always confused between usada and wada and ioc and who has authority and who's in charge of this and how does all of this work and how do they communicate with each other but it just seems like a gigantic clusterfuck well that was as i got into this system um and the exploring of this, that is what became not only clear, it was just being beaten over the head by it on a daily basis of all the conflicts of interest and all the, you know, all these organizations are intertwined and the finances are intertwined and um you know and it's increasingly um complex because you realize at the end of the day it is about the business and the athlete the individual athlete isn't necessarily um the person who's going to be protected. It's really about what is in the best interest of the Olympic organization.

And despite, let's say, what they're putting forward as a public message of integrity and fair play and clean sport and following the rules and unity and all this stuff, at the end of the day, it's about business. It's about what city is going to bid on the Olympics, the day it's about business yeah it's about what city's going to bid on the olympics the billions of dollars that go into it and they're not looking out for the individual interest of the athlete they're looking out for their business model and their business model punishing russia doesn't work and their business model catching athletes doesn't work and their business model truly fighting for for clean sport

doesn't work those are all counterproductive to to the business model of the actual olympics right so the ioc is you know arguably their mission statement is promoting you know the these ideals of the olympics and fair sport cetera. But it is a gigantic business. And, you know, this gets played out in the film and we're jumping ahead a little bit, but there's that thing that occurs and it's not really completely fleshed out in the movie, but in the wake of, you know,

all of this evidence that you're on the receiving end of from Gregory and turning it over to WADA and having them investigate, it becomes clear that there's like a thousand athletes at Sochi that were complicit and arguably positive. And thousand athletes on, uh, not just not Sochi, but a thousand Russian athletes across all sport, across all the sport. And, and then, okay, so what is the, what is going to be the, the the the punishment for that and their fate you know russia's facing not being able to participate in rio right was it was well the rio games and now the question is uh the winter games in uh pyeongchang and south korea but there was a moment where it looks like Russia's out, and then suddenly, like a couple months later, Russia's back in.

So what's going on in the back channel there that that decision gets made the way that it gets made? Well, we're seeing this go on. And Gregory wrote an op-ed to the New York Times. wrote an op-ed to the New York Times. We were able through his lawyers that he was able to submit an op-ed to the New York Times because nobody's heard from him since he's brought into protective custody in July of last year. And Gregory wrote the op-ed because essentially all the work that he did to bring this evidence forward, and this evidence was all proven beyond a reasonable doubt. This was forensically proven by Richard McLaren, is essentially being disputed by the Olympic Committee itself, which just wants to sweep this under the carpet wada the world anti-doping agency is literally uh questioning the veracity of the

findings of the man that they put in charge to lead the investigation who works with interpol who works with all these outside agencies, who proves everything forensically, scientifically, et cetera, et cetera, but they're trying to poke holes in his report. And you have the Russian ministry, no matter how much evidence has been presented, still completely denying, not only that any of this happened, denying the existence of a state-sponsored doping program, denying what is thousands of documents of evidence that Gregory put forward.

And you're seeing that on all sides of the equation, from the World Anti-Doping Agency to the Olympics and, of course, Russia, agency to the Olympics and of course Russia, that there is really no resolve to take accountability for this spectacular fraud that happened, that cheated every single clean athlete who went into those Olympic Games over the last 40 years under the belief that the rules were being upheld, under the belief that they were playing on a level playing field. And you're seeing that the actual organizations that are in charge of enforcing the rules really are going to do nothing that is actually in the best interest of the clean athletes and only protect their own business interests. And so it's been pretty...

It's very disheartening. Disheartening because what it is doing is it's setting a message. It's sending a message to every athlete who grows up believing in the Olympic ideal. That, you know, as a kid, I know that I had this or anybody who was really serious about sport. You grow up and believing in this Olympic dream that you're going to somehow go to the Olympics and you're competing under peace and harmony. And it doesn't matter whether you're Russian or American or from India or from China. The world is coming together to compete.

And it's all in the spirit of sport. And then what I've come to realize and what the film shows is what George Orwell clearly said is that sport is war without the weapons and these olympic games or world cup soccer etc are essentially just a place for a country to go to war with each other and assert its geopolitical and and power through sport right and these athletes are in essence gladiators for their country and the case of russia and this program that went for 40 years, in the case of the Sochi Olympics, Russia has been using its sport program to assert itself geopolitically and show dominance and power.

So if you can go in and win the Olympics, you're actually showing that you're strong, that you're powerful. And those Olympic medals are almost in place of its nuclear warheads or what it can do on a geopolitical level. And that is what countries are viewing the Olympic Games as. It's not about a country going in and competing peacefully and in harmony it's about hegemony it's about it's about going in and you look at those beijing olympics in china and and gregory has told me repeatedly that he got the idea to swap out the urine essentially

from the chinese at the beijing olympics now these are allegations. I have no knowledge of this, but according to Gregory, according to what Gregory told me, is that in China, the way that the system was set up is that the athletes who were reporting for the drug testing, the Chinese athletes would go and report to essentially Chinese agents, and these agents would give these athletes clean urine. So when they went in to be tested, and there's an inspector there watching them essentially pee, that these athletes had been given clean urine, and that's why none of the Chinese athletes tested positive.

And if you look at the Beijing Olympics, China swept the Beijing Olympics. They won more medals than any other country. But you, again, you look at the geopolitics of that. And what was on the line for China? It was China's coming out party to the world. It's 2008, and China is showing that not only can they pull off an Olympics, and those Olympic Games were incredible, what they did with the opening ceremonies and closing ceremonies.

We've never seen anything like that in Olympic history. Not only can they pull off the Olympics, not only are they a global superpower, but they can win. And if they can win in sport and they can win in Olympics, what does this say about business? What does this say about war? What does this say about military strength, etc., etc.? And you look at that, and then you draw the analogy to Sochi or all the other games. Of course,

the 1936 games in Berlin was one of the pivotal moments in the rise of the Third Reich and of German nationalism and pride. And Hitler used those games to consolidate his power. And so we're seeing the replicating that in each one of these games where a country is using these games to basically assert itself on a geopolitical level. Yeah, and there's no political will for the truth to come out because the stakes are too high and the ramifications of that would be too disruptive. But when you see a situation like you've presented in the film where the evidence is so overpowering and clear-cut and you have to butt up against a lack of that will,

butt up against a lack of that will, you can't help but walk away from that feeling a little bit hopeless about what the future may hold because these organizations that we've specifically vested with the authority and the responsibility of policing this, if they're not even, if they're showing disinterest or they're not going to actually, you know, act on it in the way that, you know, seems to be the morally appropriate response, then we're lost. And we're only talking about the Olympics. We're not even talking about tennis or the NBA or the NFL and, you know, the implications of, you know, unfair play on the professional level across the board. Well, i think that to me um the bigger takeaway is sport is sport and sport is always going to be a game in the sense that it is sport i mean as so long as you're paying nba players 40 million dollars a year to shoot a basket with the bat you know uh and and and so long as you're playing you know

nfl athletes whatever 25 30 million dollars a year to play football there is always going to be uh the the pressures to win but but to me the the the bigger issue that we have to look at, and what I want people to take away from this film, is looking at are we as a country, the United States or other countries, willing to tolerate a foreign powers meddling in our process, in democracy in our in our political affairs and what you see in Icarus in this film beyond a reasonable doubt is a country meddling into the global affairs of a the Olympics and sport to cheat and to collude and to and to create a fraud. And B, the analogy can clearly be drawn into our current U.S. political climate

and the meddling into our election of, okay, if a country like Russia was willing to do this, to win medals, what else are they willing to do? How far are they willing to go? And what we're seeing is no matter how much evidence is put forward which we see in the film where not only has this evidence been put forward it's all been proven and yet you still have the leaders of the olympics and and and and putin and russia and wada literally standing in the face of this evidence trying to deny that this actually happened. And we're seeing the same thing happen in the current U.S.

political situation where no matter how much evidence is being put forward about election tampering and meddling, we're still getting naysayers. We're still getting people going, this didn't happen. And I think we have to, as a country and a world, go, wait, what are we willing to tolerate? Meaning if we're willing to tolerate this in sport, well, I guess we're willing to tolerate this in terms of our own election, in terms of our own political process. We're willing to allow a foreign power to come in and meddle in our affairs and have that meddling go unpunished. And that to me is kind of the takeaway of Icarus that is incredibly upsetting, where all of this evidence

is presented and you still have the president of russia going not only did this not happen i don't even remember the guy's name who who brought all this evidence forward and not only do we know that this is not true we just know it's an outright lie and these are the the the takeaways for me from from the film that are frightening. And they're still permitted to send athletes in the Olympics. That's right. You know what I mean? You framed the film kind of using George Orwell in 1984 to kind of create an architecture around the themes.

the themes but permeating you know beneath that in every frame of this movie is the question of the the the validity of truth in our culture right and that's something that's being called into question in in a very present and dangerous way at the moment like how valuable is truth you present truth and what is you know what what are the consequences of telling the truth? And what is our cultural response to being told the truth? And what is our responsibility to do with that truth? Well, that's exactly right. see in the film is that it appears that the consequences for truth are high. And in the case of Gregory, which is deeply concerning to me on a personal level and on a bigger level, is he wrote that op-ed to the New York Times a week ago, which I encourage anyone listening to this podcast to read his New York Times op-ed,

stating about essentially the crisis of truth and what is, and despite all the evidence that he's put forward, his concerns. And two days ago, Russia issues a warrant for his arrest on top of seizing his assets in Russia, on top of his criminal charges awaiting him in Russia, taking the home of his daughter, taking the passports of his family, they're now in a battle to take his wife's apartment, and you're sitting there going, wait, so the man who came forward with the truth is going to be the man who is punished for telling the truth. And that's really, really frightening. And that's something that we have to be worried about as a planet.

Because if the consequences of telling the truth are your imprisonment, your punishment for trying to bring forward a story that needed to be told to the world, that's concerning, I mean, on a really, really big level. And, you know, and I'm really worried for him in that regard, that instead of being exalted for telling the truth. He is being demonized for telling the truth. And we're in a news cycle and a world cycle that is allowing this. Literally two weeks ago, Russia puts out a news statement through the RT and through Sputnik News that WADA was willing to drop all the charges against Russia, that Richard McLaren had found errors in his report, and that they believed that Russia should be reinstated to competition and allowed into the Winter Games. None of this was true.

This was fake news, 100% fake news, yet it was picked up by all the global newspapers as truth. And so here is this crystal clear example. And we're, of course, seeing in regards to our own election and everything, we're reading these stories out of Twitter and Facebook, et cetera, et cetera. But here firsthand, I'm watching this story. I'm reading this report and going, not only is this true, not true, this is a fake news story. And it was picked up by newspapers all over the world. And the next day, Richard McLaren is out there making statements going, this is not true. And yet that story was picked up. Yeah, the news has moved on.

Exactly. Right. And we should point out for the listener, just so we're clear, like Gregory comes to the United States to work with you and he bring in, in the wake of this McLaren report that comes out, um, that's basically indicating that there is all of this fraud going on in Russia. He brings with him all of these hard drives that you guys begin to, you know, you hide them in safety in safe places and you start to get into all of this stuff and realize like this is all the evidence of what is happening. And through a kind of a drawn out process, make this decision to turn these materials over to the New York Times, hence turning Gregory into sort of a Snowden-like figure, that then, you know, he's in danger, his life is at risk, and ultimately he ends up in protective custody, which is where he remains today. And this New York Times article comes out, there's a lot of news around this and a lot of discussion and obviously blowback on Russia that they've survived.

But, you know, it didn't look good for Putin for all of this to come out. How do you think about the relationship between that scandal that you were, you know, at ground zero for and being involved in that New York Times story? Do you see a relationship between that and Putin deciding to roll up his sleeves and start meddling in our election process and our democratic process? Like, do you think there's any logic in saying, well, oh yeah, you're going to screw with me this way. Like, let me show you how I, how, you know, what I can do. Well, you know, I, I don't know because I'm not a, uh, I'm not privy to the knowledge that the FBI or CIA or NSA has. Um, in January of this year, they, they released their In January of this year, they released their declassified report into the election meddling, and they listed seven reasons as to why they believed our election was hacked. And reason three they listed was for what Putin or Russia viewed as the U.S. involvement in the doping scandal and the Panama Papers. And what was meant by that is that because Rodchenkov essentially had come to the United States on a visa, because the story was brought to the New York Times, which is an American paper, and because the Department of Justice and FBI launched an

investigation, and because Rodchenkov was put into protective custody by American authorities, that Russia believed that the United States apparently was trying to embarrass Russia and was behind essentially the breaking of the scandal, which is not true. That's not what happened at all. But clearly, I think you can think within that mentality about government why you would perhaps believe that the United States might have been involved in that. But Gregory was certainly acting not only on his own volition, but on his own ethical and moral compass of just having a desire, insatiable desire, that he had to bring this story public. That it was so important that this story was known and that the world knew that this had happened. and that the world knew that this had happened.

But, you know, I think what we're seeing now, which is in the fallout of this election meddling, is that the film shows, without a question of a doubt, the extent to which Russia's willing to go, question of a doubt the extent to which russia is willing to go um a to conceal truth and to deny accountability and be um uh of of of of perpetrating a fraud to essentially advance their own geopolitical interests and in this case they were using sport to do that. And in the case of, as it appears to be, in our election process, they were using, you know, fake news and ads and all sorts of other methods of infiltrating our society to try to help assist the current administration to be elected, at least is what is being alleged.

And if I'm looking at what I know, at least in regards to the Icarus story and the story behind the Olympic doping scandal and Russia's involvement in this in the last 40 years, it's not that far of a leap to believe that this is happening. It's unbelievable. There are so many strings to pull. I just, I can't imagine the job of trying to edit this movie because there's so many other stories that you could pursue. And I would imagine

there were a lot of threads that you pulled that ended up on the cutting room floor. So, you know, if length and time was not a limitation on this project, on this movie, where would this exploration lead you next? I mean, does it lead you to USADA, to the IOC? Does it lead you directly to Putin? Like, where do you go, you know? It's funny, you know, as we were going through editing, my editors, there was a time where I had four assistant editors and three main editors. I mean, we had seven editors

because it was so much footage and so much. And then I had people just pulling archival footage. And it was just this team and all of us and my producing partner, Dan Kogan, and also my investors that became producers on the project, we were also emotionally invested and personally invested in the story. And there were so many areas of essentially fraud and wrongdoing. You could go down the rabbit hole.

And I remember through this process, I went, wow, we could pick a hundred fights and every single thing is compelling in and of itself. And I remember that we went through everything from in the beginning of the film, where I was going to, as part of my journey, show how the National Football League, how the testing system in the NFL is a joke, and how it's basically been put together by the players' union and the owners' union to essentially create a system that appears that there's anti-doping in the NFL, while essentially all these guys are just allowed to do whatever they want to do. And no one cares.

Right. And no one was cared. And I was going to explore how basketball essentially doesn't even have any anti-doping system. And any time basketball is questioned about that, they go to the layers, the levels of abuse within the NBA and all these other social problems. So I was going to initially explore and how tennis and I could go on and on and on about all these different sports and federations, how their systems are highly inadequate. So there was that story that I realized essentially had to drop away because we didn't have time in the film to tell that story. There was the story of WADA, where I could have went deep into the rabbit hole of that,

where WADA had been receiving information for four years from the initial Russian whistleblowers, Vitalya and Yulia Stepanov, who had been going to WADA, telling them, hey, there's a state-sponsored program in Russia, and WADA doesn't do anything about it for years. I mean, even the scene in the movie, though, when you're there and you're like, here it all is, and they're kind of like, okay, what are we supposed to do? And so we had, you know, there could have been a whole film on that. And there were other Russians coming to WADA over the years and years. And even the fact that Don Catlin refers me to Gregory Rechenkov because Catlin knows that the Russians are up to no good. Do you think that he knew

in the back of his mind that if he got you with Gregory that you would start to get a glimpse of what was actually happening? He had no idea. I don't think anybody could have imagined what they had done at Sochi. The bottle-swapping operation, I think, just was mind-boggling that it went to that level. But he certainly knew that Russia had not been playing by the rules, as well as, I think, pretty much any scientists in the world of anti-doping in the lab system. They knew in theory that, you know,

things were not being upheld because of how the system was structured. So, you know, I could have went on a multi-part series on WADA and how theoc uh co-funds wada and all the conflicts of interest and how the president of wada sits on the board and is the vice president of the ioc and i mean i could go on for hours you know i could i could have done a huge expose on the olympics and and all the politics within there and and and the stories that Gregory has told me and that he even has knowledge and information about of I mean all these various Olympic cover-ups and all these you know the problems within that organization I could have I could have went down that rabbit hole. But ultimately, the story that needed to be told,

and the film for me was not going to be a multi-part series. It wasn't going to be an exploratory expose on all the injustices in the sporting world. But to me, the biggest story of the film and what had to be told was Gregory's journey and this journey that ultimately leads him to being a whistleblower, ultimately leads to exposing the single biggest scandal in sport history, the single biggest scandal in Olympic history, and ultimately the takeaway of that, which in the film we craft in the world of Orwell, which is the world of double think, which is essentially doing one thing and saying the exact opposite. And that was essentially

Gregory's life and everything that's been going on within the larger sporting world of saying that you're upholding integrity and values and clean sport while doing nothing about actually doing that. Or presenting, you know, a test that is the anti-doping test while at the same time you've developed the anti-venom to the test and and and these were the the larger takeaways of the film that that became important in that story that We needed to tell and so we had to editorially lose anything in that process that wasn't going on that journey of Gregory's story and the exposing of this scandal to the world. And so, there was so much that is on the cutting room floor that,

I guess, could make myriads of series. Yeah, of course. Well, I mean, Gregory is the ultimate cipher because he's so likable and you can connect with him and, and people, the audience, I think connect with your relationship with him. You know, it could have very easily turned out that this guy was unlikable or just completely unsympathetic. But the fact that he is so jocular like you you just want you want him to be okay despite the flaws and the actions that he's taken and so it allows the audience member to open up to this story and receive it in a way that i think somebody other than gregory would not have been able to deliver yeah i mean he's, I mean, that's the, you know, I guess the conundrum of Gregory. On one hand, you love him, and he is the most lovable, likable character I think you're likely,

you know, going to encounter in a documentary in quite some time. He just has this way about him that you love. And at the same time, he has spent his life being involved in a very complicated scandal and concealing what was a institutional conspiracy to cheat sport and the Olympics. And his redemption is breaking free of that system that he was a part of and bringing that story to the world. It doesn't change what happened. It doesn't change the history. It doesn't change what happened. It doesn't change the history

It doesn't change that he Was a part of these I guess You know what you would call sporting crimes or fraud but his coming forward sets the record straight and without him and without his willingness to bring this story forward, the world would never know this. I mean, this story lived and died ultimately in Gregory's hands. He was the only person on planet Earth to this day

that had this evidence. Because even everybody else working in the laboratory, they had pieces and parts. They didn't have the actual evidence, and Gregory did. And the other two guys in Russia who both died of heart attacks, even they were not involved in the laboratory level. They knew of the system going on. They knew of how the system was operating,

but they weren't in the lab level, the scientific level where this story could be proven. So this story lived and died with Gregory. And ultimately, Gregory made a spectacular sacrifice, not only to leave his family, but to have an unknown fate going forward into the world. And the risks that he took to bring this story forward are pretty remarkable. And so I felt a huge burden on one hand and an honor on the other to be able to tell this tell this story that, um, and, and bring this story forward. Um, which is, uh, there was never a question in my mind or my team's mind as to, um, whether or not we wanted to, to help him, uh, tell this story. Were you ever in a situation in which a conflict of interest

presented itself? In other words, what's in the best interest of the firm or the firm, the film versus what's in Gregory's best interest in terms of kind of navigating these decisions about the New York times and the investigation and all of that, you know gregor and i truly um have a friendship had a friendship um there was a period of time for about seven months where he comes to los angeles between us breaking the story to the new york times where it, we were filming when we were making a movie still, but it was beside the point of the gravitas of what we were sitting on and understanding that we were sitting on this evidence and this knowledge and this wealth of information that was, in my opinion, in Gregory's opinion,

in my producer's opinion, incredibly important that the world needed to have this information. And so it became, how do we navigate this in the best interest of gregory and all the clean athletes who needed this information and in the best interest of of of seeing to it that this story came forward and that the truth was told rather than in the interest of the film or perhaps what could have been financial interests. And we had moments where we were going, okay, do we just bring this information forward in the film? And we realized that if we did that, that it would maybe be serving the film's purpose and the explosive nature of these allegations in the film.

But it wasn't going to be serving Gregory's purpose. It wasn't going to be serving the greater good's purpose, because what would happen is we'd bring that story forward, and then everybody would attack it. And then the film would be on the defensive as something explosive, and who knows whether or not that story could have been proven so, you know myself and my producing team and Gregory we said no, that's not the way to do it and the way that the best way to do this and

We didn't have faith in the United States government as as that investigation heated up because who knows what the US government? Was going to do with this information and they didn't, what were they going to do with it? They don't have international jurisdiction to be able to go retest urine samples that are being held by the Olympics. So we made a collective series of decisions, but each one of those decisions that we made, at least in my opinion, of those decisions that we made, at least in my opinion, we were looking at what is in the best interest of Gregory, of how to protect him, how to see to it that this story is truthfully told, and what is in the best interest of the sporting world to have this information and to have this knowledge, and how can we see to it that that this story is not that this story is not covered up that it can be proven and so by going to the new york times

we were essentially allowing this story that it that was a blessing and and a burden to to leave and a burden to leave our control and to allow the authorities who could truly investigate this and prove this to take over. And we knew that if we went to the New York Times, that it was going to be impartial in its judgment and that it wasn't going to be a story for the tabloids. It was now a news story. And if we could navigate a news story, then there was a chance that everything that Gregory had brought forward, which myself and my producing team really had no question

as to the veracity of it, whether or not it was true. It was how do we bring it forward? It had to be terrifying as soon as that was published, though. But Gregory seemed pretty chill about the whole thing, at least on film. He was chill. And the interesting thing about Gregory is he's said to me many times, as I personally was in the middle of this crisis and going

oh my god what have you gotten yourself into Brian what have you got your partners and your investors into and you're you know like this is doing you're in over your head and I certainly felt that many times. And Gregory always felt that, and I think he does to this day, that every day he's alive is an extra day that he was not going to be alive should he have stayed in Russia. That's an excellent perspective. And he viewed himself that he was essentially dead man walking.

And so every day that he's alive, and I think he has this belief right now today, that every day that he's alive, there's another day that he wouldn't have been alive had he not made the choices he made. And so I think he's looking at it from a different perspective that he, in many ways, got to live on borrowed time where I think myself and my creative and producing team had a consistent feeling of overwhelming gravity to what was being presented to us because we were not the ones who were personally involved in the years of, of,

of this conspiracy. We have to land this plane. Um, but before we do, uh, is he okay? Like what's the status of the investigation? What is the future prognosis for what's going to happen to him?

Well, uh, the department of Justice and FBI still have their ongoing investigation into the into the doping scandal, into the, you know, his his evidence. And I think they haven't decided yet if they're going to bring a case and and if they do, who they would bring that case against. He is OK right now. We launched fairsport.org. One of my producers in the film launched an organization called fairsport.org, a nonprofit, was essentially launched to help protect whistleblowers in sport and also to help

continue to protect and navigate Gregory's well-being. And this organization is trying to, A, see to it that there is some justice that is done based on, you know, the evidence that is brought forward, and also help protect athletes' rights that had medals taken from them, try to help athletes stand up to authorities that are not operating in their best interest, but also really help other whistleblowers in sport, people like Gregory, who might have a story to tell. And to that extent, we established a GoFundMe for Gregory that if any of your listeners are on the site can go and find on GoFundMe for Gregory that if any of your listeners are on the site can go and find on GoFundMe. And the hope is that we can raise enough money to continue to assist Gregory in

his well-being because the future right now for him is unknown. And it's deeply concerning on a lot of levels and we're hoping that he's okay now and he's going to be okay in a year from now and he's going to be okay in another year from now and the question of how and when he'll ever be reunited with his family, if ever, is lingering. As you see from Russia's response in that New York Times op-ed and and what you see in the film is that this story is far from over it was we had a moment where we were capturing essentially history as it was unfolding and it's still unfolding and we're still seeing the unfolding of this on our daily news cycle

in regards to Russia and in regards to what is going on and in our current political climate And so this story is not is not done. This is not this is not past history it's it was unfolding history current, and now future history as to what will happen for sport in the Olympic and the Olympic movement, what will happen to Gregory and his life and his livelihood and his family and his well-being, and what our country and other countries of the world are going to essentially tolerate or not tolerate? from our leaders and whether or not we're going to allow this continual cycle of fake news and an Orwellian

doublethink 1984 thinking to to perpetuate our society and to continue and and whether or not we're going to take action against that. On that note, you went to Congress, right, and spoke. So what was that like and how does that have you feeling in the wake of that? Does it make you optimistic that we can have that discussion and create change or no? Well, I spent a few days in Washington about a month and a half ago meeting with the chiefs of staff of a number of bipartisan Senate offices, and all of them were very interested in looking at the film and perhaps doing hearings, perhaps doing screenings. I don't know what's going to happen with that or not. That is hopefully in the works. But that experience was surreal and the one at least takeaway that I felt in speaking to whether it was a Republican office or a Democrat office, mutual interest from an American perspective to try to see to it that not only does the

evidence that is presented in the film as far as this spectacular conspiracy to cheat sport not continue, but also that the United States' interest to see to it that there is some sort of change in the system that what potentially happened in the last election doesn't repeat itself again. And there certainly seemed to be a very mutual shared interest in that. And I guess history will determine whether or not something is ultimately done or not done. But it's a pretty scary story when you really start thinking about the bigger implications behind it. It's strange times that we live in, and it truly is Orwellian in many ways and truth is

under attack. And I think it's never been more, uh, important for us to be discerning about the news that we consume and, uh, and our responsibility to, to, uh, to speak the truth and to speak truth to power. And that's certainly what you've done in this film. And it's quite amazing. So for people that have not seen it, I strongly suggest you check it out, even though this was basically a two-hour spoiler. It doesn't matter.

It's really quite something, man. So thank you for making the movie. And I'm wishing Gregory well, and I'm wishing your journey well. And I hope that you make more movies in this vein. Yeah, I appreciate it. I hope the film Icarus is currently streaming on Netflix so you can find it and uh and i'm looking at other projects right now in in the documentary space um to take these this knowledge that that i've had and this experience um and um and expand upon that into uh into other uh subjects and in the documentary space because I what is really cool I think about

documentary and amazing is that as a filmmaker you can set out on on a journey and you ultimately don't know where it's going to lead to and creatively you have the power to craft anything you want because it's an unscripted format which which opens up the world of possibilities but you also don't know what you're going into and in case of this i i couldn't have imagined as i set out on this journey that i would end up where it led to and that I would end up with Gregory and my team exposing this gigantic conspiracy and scandal, but that I would also end up so much wiser in understanding of the world that we're living in. And that is something very cool about documentary, that it can take you on a journey that is not only unexpected,

but that can actually have impact and change in the world. So I'm hoping to continue to make projects that do that. Yeah, I would imagine you feel some level of responsibility to do so, to continue this conversation in a variety of ways, you know, extending the themes that you've introduced in this movie. That's what I'm looking to do. And hopefully the more eyes on this film will allow me to continue on that journey. Cool. Thanks, man. Thanks, Rich.

Thanks for talking to me. If people want to connect with Brian, you're at Brian Fogel on Twitter, right? Are there other places where people can reach you? Is that the main way? At Brian Fogel on Twitter right are there other places where people can reach you is that the main way at Brian Fogel on Twitter Brian with a Y B-R-Y-A-N-F-O-G-E-L

on Twitter I have a website brianfogel.com and the movie is Icarus on Netflix and are you doing any screenings coming up are you traveling around with the movie or what's going on the film launched August 4th And are you doing any screenings coming up? Are you traveling around with the movie or what's going on?

The film launched August 4th. Netflix is in the process of scheduling. They've scheduled a lot of screenings for various groups and critics and things like that. And I think they are planning some screenings coming up in the near future. But certainly it being on the platform, it's globally available. I'm just wondering if you're doing Q&As or any kind of live events, that kind of thing. Because I'm sure people would love to see you get up and have a conversation with somebody relevant to the movie. Yeah, that's in the works and they're uh they're we're they're trying to um uh to get those planned right now as we kind of head into the next several months so uh

um i don't have specifics on that but i do know that there uh there will be uh some screenings and talkbacks and q and a's are there going to be any uh like you know like akin to the dvd extras like you have there's so many so much footage you're sitting on i would imagine there's all kinds of other stories that you could tell that are relevant you could probably spend the next couple of years working on that oh yeah but i would love to see some of the stuff that you had to cut for time oh there was so much i mean because in the in the like i interviewed guys like alex gibney the documentary filmmaker who did the armstrong lie who's just brilliant and um and the interview that i shot with him was was so compelling i interviewed victor conti i interviewed tyler

hamilton and and timmy duggan and I interviewed all these other scientists in Europe and sporting officials. And so, yeah, I mean, the amount of footage that I compiled is pretty vast. And 97% of it didn't make it into the film. So, yeah, that could, I guess, be an addendum that could be the ongoing docu-series. All right, well, I'm going to sit here and hold my breath until you do that. All right, man, good talking to you. Thank you. Thanks, Rich.

Peace. Bye. Wild, right? Incredible. Please make a point of checking out Icarus. You will not be disappointed. I think we're going to be hearing a lot more about this film, about the important issues and questions that it raises,

especially as we head into Oscar season this spring. Until then, please check out the show notes for this week's show on the episode page at richroll.com. We have a full video version of the podcast available on YouTube, youtube.com forward slash richroll. Make sure you subscribe on that page as well. If you would like to support this show and my work, share it with your friends and on social media, leave a review on Apple Podcasts, hit that subscribe button on iTunes, Apple Podcasts. We have a Patreon set up for people

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