Also watched it. Very good. As mentioned, I also thought Grigory was a very likable fella.
My thoughts:
- Where there are competitive athletes and money, there will always be some sort of cheating. No arguing this point.
- Testing as come so far that the whole "system" of cheating as changed. I thought it was really cool in the late 90s/early 2000's with the undetectable gear. To me, that was a great way to beat the system but of course technology caught up to it. Now with the technology, the Russians had no other way then to "swap samples". Does anyone remember the early/mid 90's when all the female sprinters had the super long finger nails? Those were used to puncture a false bladder with clean urine placed inside the womens snatch when she went in for a test.
- Although Don Catlin has spent his career trying to catch guys, he's very likable as well and almost seems that he could have made the choice to become one of the bad guys (helping cheaters) but he stayed on the straight and narrow. He's definitely aged since Bigger Faster Stronger but then again he's 80 or so. There's a scene in BFS where he talks about going back with modern technology to test left over samples from the 84 LA Olympics and he decided not to continue testing the old samples because of all the positives that were showing with the current technology. IMO 84 and maybe 88 (until Ben Johnson) was the heyday of PED use in Olympics before the technology and negative media attention caught up.
- I find it 100% of a waste of tax payer dollars that the government is even involved in this shit. Why in the fuck would the US government care 2 shits what Grigory was doing in the Russian lab/program. Same bullshit as the waste of time and money looking into baseball. The US government has much much bigger issues to deal with and dollars to be spent elsewhere- education, infrastructure, etc, etc