Telluride Premieres ‘Icarus: The Aftermath,’ Oscar Winner Bryan Fogel’s Follow Up On Man Who Exposed Russia’s Massive Athletics Doping Scheme

03.09.2022 - 19:13 / deadline.com

Vladimir Putin demands absolute fealty to the Russian state, and woe to anyone who defies him.

Oil executive Ravil Maganov, whose company had criticized the Russian invasion of Ukraine, took a fatal nosedive earlier this week from the window of a Moscow hospital, in what – charitably – has been termed mysterious circumstances.

Was Maganov’s name engraved on a Kremlin enemies list? Maybe so, maybe not. But one man who can be certain the Kremlin would like him dead is the Russian chemist Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, who used to run his nation’s athletics anti-doping laboratory. As documented in the 2018 Oscar-winning film Icarus, Rodchenkov blew the whistle on Russia’s elaborate scheme to cheat on drug tests before Olympic and other world sporting competitions, a devious system that the chemist himself had implemented.

Rodchenkov fled to the United States and went into hiding in the midst of making the documentary directed by Bryan Fogel. But what has happened to him since? The new documentary Icarus: The Aftermath answers that question. Fogel’s follow up premiered Friday night at the Telluride Film Festival.

“We’ve kept the film very tightly under wraps for the last four and a half years that we were working on it, really, which began almost immediately after Icarus was released,” Fogel tells Deadline. “We kept it under wraps largely due to security concerns.”

The film reveals Rodchenkov has been living like a hunted man, forced to relocate frequently within the U.S., lest potential Russian assassins track him down. He left his family behind in Russia, yet doesn’t regret exposing his country’s doping perfidy. Rodchenkov remains a staunch critic of the way his homeland is being run.

“The problem of Russia is no one can tell the