Rodchenkov ran the Russian anti-doping laboratory for a decade. He resigned after the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) accused Russia of numerous violations and recommended that Russian track and field athletes be banned from the Rio Summer Olympics. Shortly afterward, Rodchenkov left Russia in fear for his life. “Grigory came to the United States only after a friend of his from the Kremlin told him that the FSB is coming to kill him, that they were going to stage his suicide,” Walden told me.

Shortly after arriving in the United States, Rodchenkov learned that one of his colleagues, former Russian anti-doping agency chief Nikita Kamaev, died under mysterious circumstances. Like many observers, Rodchenkov was convinced it wasn’t of natural causes: Kamaev had been writing a tell-all book about the Russian government’s athletic doping programs.

This prompted Rodchenkov to come forward with what he knew. He became a whistleblower on the extensive doping program he had overseen and which had been used to boost the Russian team’s performance at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. (Rodchenkov’s allegations were detailed by The New York Times, and his journey, from lab director to whistleblower, in the riveting Netflix documentary Icarus, which was nominated for an Academy Award today.)

According to Rodchenkov, the scheme involved doping Russian athletes with a three-drug cocktail during the Games. At night, Rodchenkov and his FSB curators would swap the Russian athletes’ dirty urine for their clean urine, and the athletes would test negative for performance-enhancing drugs. The Russian Olympic team swept the medal count that year, with 33 medals, 13 of them gold. Rodchenkov has said he believes that half of those medals were the result of his doping work in the laboratory at Sochi.

Icarus recounts how, because of the mounting fear that his life was in danger, Rodchenkov went into the Federal Witness Protection Program. He now lives in an undisclosed location in the United States, and Walden said he has been told to assume that there are Russian agents hunting for Rodchenkov on American soil.

After Rodchenkov’s revelations were corroborated by two independent investigations, Russia was stripped of four of its gold medals, and the Russian Olympic team, along with Russia’s Olympic officials, were banned from competing in the 2018 Winter Olympics. Russian athletes who can prove they are clean will be allowed to compete under a neutral flag. The much-feared Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, which conducts criminal investigations and is run by one of Vladimir Putin’s college buddies, has also looked into the matter and predictably found that Rodchenkov’s claims are unsubstantiated, despite the overwhelming evidence in the independent investigations.