Jake Swantko

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” Lance Armstrong says at the beginning of Icarus, the 2017 winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Armstrong won the Tour de France seven consecutive times from 1998 to 2005. Throughout his career he was the subject of doping allegations—extraordinary claims which, again and again, he denied, pointing to the lack of extraordinary evidence. Until, that is, a 2013 interview with Oprah Winfrey, where he finally admitted to long-term usage of performance-enhancing drugs.

Two years after Armstrong’s admission, cycling enthusiast Bryan Fogel set out to prove he could cheat the system by taking performance-enhancing drugs for six months prior to participating in the Haute Route, the world’s most prestigious cycling race for amateur cyclists. He hoped to improve his placing over the previous year and avoid being caught, thus proving how easy it is for professional athletes to get away with doping. Fogel decided to document his efforts, and hired University of Oregon graduate Jake Swantko, BA ’11 (journalism: electronic media), to serve as the documentary’s director of photography.

As a journalism student at the UO, Swantko found his calling when senior instructor Rebecca Force gave him a camera.

“I think in a lot of ways I was so relieved, because I was struggling as a writer to find my voice,” said Swantko in an interview with Around the O. “When you pick up a camera, the lens and light speak adjectives and verbs for you. You start to become a more visual storyteller. For me, the camera started to speak for me. I started to fall in love with some of these stories. If not for the school, I don’t know exactly what I would be doing.”

Fogel trained for months before the race, taking drugs under the supervision of Grigori Rodchenkov, at the time the director of Russia’s national antidoping laboratory. The documentary takes a sharp turn halfway through, though, when Rodchenkov reveals his complicity in covering up the systematic doping of Russian athletes in order to boost their performance.

“He (Rodchenkov) is without a doubt the most interesting character I’ve ever met,” Swantko said. “. . . I have never seen him as anything but a champion for clean sports. He has shown to this day—and while his life is still sort of in the balance, he is providing information to the highest governing bodies within sport to clean up the corruption within antidoping.”

At the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, Icarus won the Special Jury Orwell Prize; at the Sundance Film Festival: London, it won the first-ever Audience Choice Award. It was sold to Netflix for $5 million and premiered on the streaming service on August 4, 2017.

Then came the 90th Academy Awards, where Icarus was nominated in the Best Documentary Feature category.

“It was a very unnerving feeling,” Swantko said of the ceremony—he admits to sweating and feeling nervous when his category came up. “Laura Dern said ‘Icarus’ and we just exploded. It was insane, another level of euphoria and excitement. It was indescribable, the feeling. That feeling does not get old.”

Since the Oscars, Swantko has participated in projects for HBO and PBS. “I thought by no means when I graduated in 2011 that any of this would be possible. As Grigory would say, ‘Can you imagine?’ It’s unbelievable, it’s stranger than fiction, which makes you think anything in this world is possible.”