Like anyone prepping for a race, Bryan Fogel set his alarm early on Jan. 23 — 5:22 a.m., to be exact — to see whether he had made the cut.
“But I was already half awake in bed because I couldn’t sleep the night before,” Fogel said. “And then, when they read the names, my phone, email, Facebook and everything else blew up like never before. I was returning hundreds of messages until 2 in the morning.”
The flood of congratulations was for an instant win: Fogel’s 2017 film “Icarus” was nominated for the Academy Award for best documentary feature.
“Icarus” both chronicled and triggered a chain of events leading to the banning of the entire Russian Olympic team from the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang. Debuting at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, the movie went on to be acquired by after a bidding war sparked by its riveting, improbable story.
Fogel conceived “Icarus” as a “Super Size Me”-style experiment in performance-enhancing doping — with Fogel as the willing guinea pig, posterior injections and all. The film opens in Boulder before taking a hard turn into international intrigue on the world’s biggest sporting stage, replete with secretive meetings, surveillance and investigations, including from the World Anti-Doping Agency.
