Lawfare Archive: Bryan Fogel on 'Icarus' and Russia
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 31 July 2021
⏱️ 42 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
From August 12, 2017: The new Netflix documentary Icarus may seem at first glance off the beaten path for Lawfare. It's a film about doping in international sports, not national security law or policy. But as Benjamin Wittes explained when he reviewed it here, it's really about much more than that:
Icarus is not about L’Affaire Russe or Russian interference with the 2016 election. But if you want to understand L’Affaire Russe, you should watch it. Because Icarus is the story of the Russian government’s corruption of the integrity of supposedly neutral international processes and its use of covert action to tamper with those processes. If that sounds a little familiar, it should. It is easy to substitute in one’s mind as one watches this film a foreign country’s electoral system for the elaborate anti-doping testing regime whose systematic circumvention and undermining Icarus portrays. The corruption of process is similar. The motivation—the elevation of Russian national pride—significantly overlaps. The lies about it in the face of evidence are indistinguishable. And the result in both cases is a legitimacy crisis, of Olympic medals in one case and of a presidential election in another—a crisis that produces investigation and scandal.
This week, Wittes asked Fogel to come on the podcast and talk about the film and its relationship to the broader concerns about Russia that have dominated public attention of late.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
| 0:04.0 | To access an ad-free version of the LawFair podcast, |
| 0:08.0 | become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash law fair. |
| 0:14.0 | That's patreon.com slash law fair. |
| 0:18.0 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, |
| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:29.0 | Hello, this is LawFair intern Cristiano Wayne with an episode from the LawFair Archives from July 31st, 2021. |
| 0:47.0 | The Olympics are in full swing in Tokyo. |
| 0:50.0 | No in-person spectators are allowed, but the games, as always, are drawing international attention |
| 0:56.0 | and generating storylines beyond the sports themselves. |
| 0:59.0 | Russian athletes are competing under an organization called the Russian Olympics Committee, |
| 1:04.0 | because the Russian nation itself is barred from competing after the country's massive doping scandal |
| 1:10.0 | at the Sochi Olympics and earlier is exposed and prosecuted over the last few years. |
| 1:15.0 | For this episode from the Archives, I've chosen August 2017 conversation |
| 1:20.0 | between Benjamin Woodis and filmmaker Brian Fogel about his documentary, Icarus, |
| 1:26.0 | which provides a first-hand look at the Russian doping scandal through the experience of one of its main architects. |
| 1:33.0 | They talk about the level of Russian corruption, why authoritarian leaders care about international sports in the first place, |
| 1:40.0 | and how Putin's behavior during the 2014 Sochi Olympics and the fallout of the scandal mirrors his approach to the foreign policy. |
| 1:49.0 | I'm Benjamin Woodis, and this is the Laughair Podcast, August 12th, 2017. |
| 1:59.0 | The film Icarus by Brian Fogel is a new Netflix documentary about Russian Olympic doping |
| 2:07.0 | and the defection of the chief scientist at Russia's Anti-Doping Lab, a man named Gregory Rudchenkov. |
| 2:14.0 | At one level, it's a movie about sports and cheating in them by a state actor. |
... |
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