Contradictheory: Olympics, doping and institutional corruption

I recently watched an excellent documentary called Icarus that was nominated for Best Documentary in this year’s Oscars. It’s about the state-sanctioned doping and corruption scandal in Russia and how the system seems to overwhelm the individual. It seems that for years, the Russians have found success on the sporting field not through the spirit of sportsmanship but by judicious doping programmes designed by the government to avoid detection.

One of the things I found interesting in the documentary is the contrast between the personal stories of the documentarian and the head of the Russian anti-doping lab, and the larger, more impersonal acts of the Russian government and anti-doping agencies in general.