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Eastern Europe
February 9, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 19
amateur cycling competition, in order to test the ability of anti-doping tests and agencies to detect banned substances.
His search for the best doping coach leads him to Grigory Rodchenkov, the head of the Moscow anti- doping laboratory, who counsels Fogel remotely for several months and seeks to console him when his doping scheme fails.
Fogel takes part twice in the Haute Route amateur bike competition in the Alps, which he describes as the "single hardest amateur bike race in the world". In 2014, he participates drug-free and fin- ishes 14th out of 40 contenders in the long, seven- stage version of the race. He then stumbles upon Rodchenkov, who appears to be an eccentric, but encyclopaedic mind with regard to everything
that is drug- and sports-related. A former athlete himself, Rodchenkov walks Fogel through a com- prehensive doping schedule over several months via Skype.
The results of his doping efforts are underwhelm- ing. In the 2015 race, Fogel is placed 27th, his performance sabotaged by a bike failure in the second stage of the competition. A disappointed Fogel then flies to Moscow to meet Rodchenkov in person, and that is when he stumbles upon what appears to be one of the worst kept secrets in Russian and international sport.
During Fogel's stay in Russia, Rodchenkov, whose boundless energy and quirks successfully conceal a history of mental illness, is visibly shaken when his childhood friend, Nikita Kamaev, dies of an ap- parent heart attack in February 2016. Kamaev, 52, and an executive at RUSADA, had a young wife and was planning to have children, Rochenkov says.
"I've known him since school and he never com- plained about his heart. [...] He wrote book.... It is dangerous to write book in Russia," he laments on camera in “Icarus”. "WADA is ready to pay any- thing for me and for you [Fogel] to disappear be- cause we destroy not only their future, we destroy their past," he continues.
Kamaev was the second Russian anti-doping executive to die in less than two weeks, after Vy- acheslav Sinev, the RUSADA chairman, was found dead with signs of violent beating on his body in early February 2016. Neither of the two murder cases have so far been solved.
A garrulous man by nature, it does not take much for the grieving Rodchenkov to start spilling the beans. He reveals to Fogel the ‘why’ – Putin had been disappointed by Russia's results at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver – and ‘how’ of the Russian doping scheme.
Rodchenkov reveals in “Icarus” a cheating con- spiracy so huge that it is almost beyond belief even for fans of conspiracy theories. According
to him, the Russian government and secret ser- vices outsmarted WADA and its security measures at Sochi by exchanging athletes' urine samples
at night (in order to avoid WADA's 24-hour CCTV cameras) through a secret back room. Both the samples that were meant for testing and those for storage - each athelete is required to submit two urine samples for testing, as per WADA's procedures, only one of which is tested in a first instance - had been replaced by fake ones for all the participating Russian athletes, he claims.
Fully aware of the danger to his life following his revelations, Rodchenkov asks Fogel to help him secure political refugee status for himself – but not his wife and children, surprisingly – in the US. After overcoming several roadblocks, the man whom Putin called a "jerk" manages to get him- self included in the US witness protection pro- gramme and goes into hiding.
Credible voices have long criticised the ability
of professional sports organisations to spot and prosecute cheaters. For starters, some of the practices and substances banned by WADA, such as blood doping (extraction and re-introduction of blood samples into the body to enhance oxygen levels), are notoriously difficult to spot. According to Rodchenkov, athletes and their coaches have long mastered techniques to outsmart WADA's