‘Icarus’ Soars—Thanks to a Palisadian Crisis-Buster

By JOHN HARLOW | Editor-in-Chief

Last week, the Palisadian-Post introduced you to Michael Sitrick, a Palisadian you really only get to know if you are deep-pocketed and in deep trouble. In his latest “how to survive trouble” guide, “The Fixer,” the peerless PR spinner lays out the background to the documentary “Icarus,” about the Russian athlete doping scandal. On Sunday, Feb. 28, filmmaker Dan Fogel won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. This is an exclusive, edited-for-length extract from “The Fixer.”

Looking back over a rather eventful career, it seems the tougher the situation, the more ferocious the criticism, the more likely it is that our firm (Sitrick And Associates) will get involved.

A case from 2016 unleashed one of the biggest controversies of my career, as our firm helped expose the biggest Olympic doping scandals of all time, weeks before the start of the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro.

My partner Sallie Hofmeister (a former reporter and editor for The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times) and I gave the worldwide scoop as an exclusive to The New York Times, which published a stunning page-one exposé on Friday, May 13, 2016, and ran a front-page follow-up the next day.

The story told how some government officials in Russia had orchestrated a doping program that served dozens of Russian athletes, including 14 members of the cross-country ski team and two bobsledders who had won two Olympian gold medals.

Our timing was intentional. Our clients were the director and producer-financier of a documentary film on the doping scheme and they were concerned that the film’s credibility would be attacked. By giving the Times months to corroborate the film’s allegations, we pre-empted the attacks while promoting the film before it had even been sold.

The case begins, as many of my cases do, with a phone call from someone’s lawyer.

Ed Stier, who represents another Sitrick client, the private equity investor Ray Chambers, wanted me to help his client, the documentary company, and its filmmaker, Bryan Fogel.

The (Lance) Armstrong scandal had given Fogel an idea.

What if (Fogel) entered a sanctioned bicycle race, doped himself in a way so as not to get caught and then showed in a documentary film how he did it?

The filmmaker then talked to doping experts, but no one dared get involved. Eventually a scientist told him to contact a man in Moscow, one of the leading anti-doping experts in the world, Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, who helped Fogel dope himself for the next race.

Meeting with Fogel over Skype, Rodchenkov showed him, on screen, how to inject (steroids)—not into his leg, where the bruising would be detected, but in the buttocks.

Fogel entered a second race, and although he did not finish (accident), he felt much stronger under the effects of the steroids.

During all of this, German television aired a documentary on Olympic doping (which) fingered one main character as responsible for the entire (Russian) operation: Rodchenkov.

With its reputation in question, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) recommended that Rodchenkov be removed from his position for aiding the widespread cheating and destroying lab samples to obstruct follow-up tests.

Whispering over Skype, (Rodchenkov) told Fogel that officers with FSB (the former KGB) were watching every move. He told Fogel he needed to escape to the United States.

Fogel arranged for Rodchenkov’s passage, picked him up at LAX and drove him to a nondescript apartment that would be his home for the next months.

Rodchenkov told Fogel that while he never took bribes, he did follow orders to provide drugs to those on “the list” given to him by Russian officials.

Fogel now realized he had a much bigger story to tell but my clients feared some government officials might try to discredit Rodchenkov as a rogue lab operator and that U.S. investigators might turn against him.

We decided to strike pre-emptively, having Fogel and Rodchenkov go public in a very big way, and fast—yet by going narrow and deep, rather than wide and shallow as a press conference would have done.

We needed the perfect Lead Steer (a blue-chip media brand that other journalists would trust and follow), one with international influence but also with the heft of ink.

We suggested The New York Times.

We advised Fogel and Rodchenkov to unspool their story to the Times pretty much as they told it to us but with more detail—what the room looked like where the swapping of the samples took place, exactly how tainted samples were swapped for cleans ones through a small hole in the wall separating the official lab from a secret lab next door, and how they covered up the hole during day-time hours.

That night the reporters (Rebecca Ruiz and Michael Schwirtz) flew to Los Angeles for three days of interviewing. The next morning Fogel arrived at 8:30 a.m. at our offices with his dog, Max, a big beautiful Vizsla with high anxiety. The reporters spent hours interviewing Rodchenkov and Fogel and examining documents, spreadsheets, emails and photographs showing how the elaborate doping lab worked. Max spent much of the time snoozing.

The next day, at noon, a sudden glitch: Ed Stier told us “60 Minutes” was airing a doping story immediately and wanted to speak to Rodchenkov. Fogel vetoed the idea.

We informed the reporters. Not to do so might make them think we had been double-dealing with a second outlet.

The thoroughness and sophistication of the (Times) reporting was worthy of the “paper of record” and delivered riveting details. (Such as: Banned drugs were code-named “Duchess.”)

The operation had been so well disguised that Rodchenkov received a commendation from WADA, which issued a report calling the Sochi (Winter Olympics held in Russia) “a milestone in the evolution of the Olympic Games anti-doping program.”

Yes, it was—but not in the way WADA had intended.

That same morning as the Times published its first story I explained my strategy to Dennis Kneale (Sitrick’s co-writer on “The Fixer”): We would line up follow-on interview at a few other outlets, “and then we are done. Bet you we get a thousand articles worldwide.”

Sure enough, more than a thousand articles would follow in the ensuring eight weeks.

The response and fallout were swift and sweeping.

A flood of media calls came into Sitrick And Company, thanks in part to Fogel setting up a temporary website and listing his contact details and those of the firm.

But we held off providing Rodchenkov or Fogel to other media for interviews, figuring the rest of the press already was reporting what the Times had reported first.

The Russian government dismissed the Times story as a political attack. “Those allegations look absolutely groundless,” a spokesman for President Putin told reporters. “All this simply looks like slander by a turncoat.”

The Russian sports minister bylined a piece in The Times of London, apologizing for previous doping by his track and field athletes but pleading for their ban to be lifted for Rio.

“Serious mistakes have been made by the federation management, along with athletes and coaches wo have broken anti-doping rules and neglected the principle of fair play … Let us be clear. We are ashamed of them,” he wrote.
We were working on encouraging a second wave of coverage to ensure that WADA vetted what Rodchenkov had said.

We suggested Fogel write (WADA) a letter calling for an immediate investigation and slated it for delivery on the day the (next Times) story ran.

WADA did the testing, providing the reporters with something new beyond the original story.

Someone at the anti-doping agency leaked the Fogel letter to his rival—the producer of the German documentary featuring the doping confession of the Russian runner Yuliya Stepanova.
The producer posted Fogel’s letter on Twitter, along with video of Skype calls with Rodchenkov, which had been recorded unknowingly and surreptitiously, according to Rodchenkov.

In June the global governing body for track and field barred the entire Russian track team from Rio. On July 18 WADA released a 100-page report confirming all of Rodchenkov’s claims.

The investigators got access to 95 urine samples from Russian athletes in Sochi stored in the International Olympic Committee (IOC) vault in Lausanne and chose 11 at random for inspection. All 11 showed signs of tampering with scratches on the inner ring of the bottle caps and abnormal levels of table salt in the urine—that last detail a clue that Rodchenkov had advised investigators to search for in the samples as a way to prove he was telling the truth.

The very next day the anti-doping agency took the unprecedented step of recommending that the IOC ban the entire Russian Olympic delegation from the 2016 games—every athlete in every sport. An appeals court upheld the ban on Russia’s track team.

Russia’s President Putin responded by suspending the sports officials criticized in the report and asking for “fuller more objective information that is based on facts” and warning “today we see a dangerous relapse of politics intruding into sports.”

At the 2016 Summer Games in Rio, the Russians garnered 27 percent fewer medals than they had won in the 2012 Summer Games in London when the doping was underway. In Rio they grabbed 19 golds (down three), 18 silvers (down five) and 19 bronzes (down 13)

(Editor’s note: The damage carried on to the Winter Olympic Games in South Korea where Russian-born athletes were only able to join the opening ceremony not as state-sponsored athletes but in drab gray coats and blue jeans competing under the banner OAR—Olympic Athletes from Russia, an internationally sanctified public humiliation inflicted on the Putin government.)

And our client’s doping documentary?

Fogel’s film, titled “Icarus,” debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2017 (where it won the Orwell prize for best documentary) and was purchased by Netflix for one of the highest prices ever paid for a non-fiction film at Sundance.

Variety reported: “The $5 million pact is one of the biggest ever for a non-fiction film.”

As this book went to press, Rodchenkov was in the U.S. Witness Protection Program.

Without him and Fogel and (producer) Dan Cogan, their lawyers—including Stier, and the help of the Sitrick team, this stunning Olympic scandal might still be buried in the darkness of the International Olympic Committee vault in Lausanne rather than sparking international outrage.

From “The Fixer” by Michael Sitrick with Dennis Kneale, published by Regnery.