The Detection Of Dishonesty In The Story Of Brian Fogel

The Detection of Dishonesty

Samaira Ansari's quote, "One lie is enough to question all truth," is exemplified in the story of Brian Fogel. Initially, Fogel was a competitive amateur cyclist who became interested in the topic of doping in sports and sought to understand how easy it was to cheat drug tests. He enlisted the help of Grigory Rodchenkov, the head of Russia's anti-doping lab, to investigate the issue. What began as a simple inquiry soon revealed a much larger story of a state-sponsored doping program and cover-up by the Russian government. Fogel dedicated himself to protecting Rodchenkov's testimony and bringing the truth to light. Through his work, filmmaker Brian Fogel uses tropes such as metaphors and repetition as well as imagery

One example is the ongoing use of the needle metaphor all across the film. The needle symbolism appears numerous times within the film, both in the form of recordings of athletes receiving injections as well as in the words of the subjects being interviewed. The needle represents not only the injection of performance-enhancing drugs, but also the risks of doping, system manipulation, and betrayal of the athletes who use it. The consistency of this metaphor is intended to emphasize the seriousness of the issue and the extent to which doping is prevalent in sports. Furthermore, this emphasizes the idea that doping is a systemic problem impacted by a lack of effective anti-doping measures in place, rather than a personal choice made by athletes. As a result, Fogel's metaphor of the needle, combined with footage and interviews of athletes in the doping process, exemplifies to the audience the ease with which steroids can be obtained as well as the fragility of the system because athletes will not be caught using

Fogel effectively employs these logos throughout the film, particularly when interviewing Grigory Rodchenkov in scenes involving the doping process that Russian athletes underwent in order to illegally bypass doping tests. The use of this imagery communicates to the audience that Russian Olympic athletes were not secretly taking performance-enhancing drugs on their own, but were instead forced by the state government to compete illegally in the Olympics for the sake of national pride. This then demonstrates that governments secretly encouraged and approved doping athletes by exhibiting that this was a state-sponsored program rather than an individual program. The use of this imagery also raises the question of whether sports representatives from other countries, or even the Olympics itself, were aware of doping among their own athletes. Therefore, the strong visuals that Brian Fogel uses successfully support the assertion that the Olympic Organization has not taken enough steps to stop the doping scandal in their