Mon, Dec 7, 2015
All the stories of young athletes begin with the same dream: becoming a champion. The dream might stay intact, but the way to get there is often filled with secrets. A young boy watches his dad win the amateur cycling races every weekend. What he also witnesses are the street fights between cyclists who are high on amphetamines and alcohol. He is fascinated by this physical and mental violence and wants to become a cyclist like his dad. A street soccer player is offered a pro contract for the Italian Premier League, but very soon he finds himself getting a huge amount of injections before important matches. A Jamaican-born Canadian immigrant sees in sprinting an opportunity to become someone. But to raise his level to pro competition, his coach advises him to take steroids. A few years later, he will break the world record at the Olympics in Seoul and become the center character of the biggest doping scandal in history.
Mon, Dec 14, 2015
In sports, once you get involved in doping, there's only one option: lying. But what happens when you get mixed up in your own lies? Or when you have to double-cross your own wife to save your soul? A doping control officer falls in love with a doped athlete and decides to help her buy EPO. An elite cyclist devises a near-perfect ruse to outsmart the anti-doping authorities and win the Tour the France. A cross-country ski coach crashes into a police roadblock after fleeing from a razzia at the Olympic village.
Mon, Dec 21, 2015
Sports can be an expressway to escape reality. And medications aren't always used for what they were meant. A quadriplegic alpinist mutilates himself in order to seek the same adventures he had before his fatal car accident. The widow of a cyclist recounts the on and off the bike excesses of her late husband when he was overexposed to medication. A once successful bodybuilder pays an ironic price for his young man's wish to become different than the average man. Using chemicals and pain stimuli to reach brief moments of ecstasy, the three stories in this film have a same kind of desire in common: a very deep wish to extend themselves, extend their reality. And they all find it through the excess of the body.
Mon, Dec 28, 2015
Institutions officially are against doping. But in reality, they only have one aim: to get medals. A GDR athlete falls into the state organised program of the Stasi, blinded by her need to escape physical violence at home and her wish to become a superstrong 'hybrid' woman. A doctor is asked to lead the first anti-doping program for the American Olympic committee, but his successor raises questions about who got 'caught' and who didn't. A powerlifter infiltrates a medical study that seeks to determine wether steroids truly work or not, but sabotages the experiment. This study will mislead people's opinions towards steroids for decades, and the powerlifter starts a lucrative career as the biggest doping dealer of his generation.