The EconomistAugust 1st 2020 Books & arts 672
1Rodchenkov calls it, was stepped up under
Vladimir Putin, who saw Olympic success
as a way to project power in the post-Soviet
world. After the embarrassment of the Van-
couver Winter Olympics of 2010, in which
Russia won just three golds, and with Sochi
next, officials were loth to leave anything
to chance. Mr Rodchenkov and his team de-
veloped a highly effective cocktail of ste-
roids, known as the Duchess, dissolved in
Chivas Regal (or vermouth for those who
liked it sweeter). During the games, Rus-
sian medal contenders’ urine samples
were passed through a “mousehole” in the
wall of his Sochi lab at night, taken by fsb
(security-service) agents who had worked
out how to open supposedly tamper-proof
bottles without leaving marks, replaced
with clean pee and passed back. A spook
posing as a plumber oversaw the scam.
Mr Rodchenkov was very good at his job.
Across five winter and summer Olympic
games, not one elite athlete under his guid-
ance was caught during competitions. The
trick, he says, was to offer the odd sacrifi-
cial lamb lower down the pecking order so
as not to look suspicious. In one case, when
a well-known biathlete’s sample tested
positive as inspectors from the World Anti-
Doping Agency (wada) looked on, he man-
aged to switch the paperwork, leaving an
unknown wrestler to take the fall.
Keeping one step ahead in the cat-and-
mouse with wadaand global sports ad-
ministrators was not hard; wadawas a “hot
air machine”, hobbled by indecision.
Olympic officials talked tough on doping
control but worried that scandals would
scare off sponsors and audiences. In the
end, this impotent anti-doping regime was
forced to get much tougher after a series of
revelations in the international media.
The author has since attained celebrity
as a snitch, starring in an Oscar-winning
documentary, “Icarus” (see picture on pre-
vious page), and having an American anti-
doping law named after him. But his status
has come at a cost. Granted political asy-
lum in America, he lives in protective cus-
tody in an undisclosed location. When he
leaves home, flanked by at least one body-
guard, he sometimes wears a bulletproof
vest. He has reason to worry, given Russia’s
vengeful attitude to “traitors”. Two former
doping officials who stayed in Russia died
11 days apart in mysterious circumstances.
His erstwhile paymasters have been
forced to admit violations, but hardly ap-
pear chastened. Russia is appealing against
a four-year Olympic ban. It continues to
play games, submitting “a clumsily adul-
terated pack of lies” to wadainvestigators,
which, says Mr Rodchenkov, was “so art-
lessly counterfeited that it was almost as if
they were begging to be caught”. Paraphras-
ing George Orwell, he concludes that the
Russian state is as conscious as ever of the
truth, but as wedded as ever to lies. 7O
neoficeland’smostcelebratedau-
thors, Audur Ava Olafsdottir writes
quirky and beguiling fiction about people
who leave familiar environments, venture
into the unknown and end up learning
more about themselves than about their
new surroundings. In “Butterflies in No-
vember”, a woman turns her back on her
worries and heads off with her best friend’s
deaf-mute son, her three goldfish and her
recent lottery winnings on a zany yet en-
lightening Icelandic road-trip. In the gritti-
er “Hotel Silence”, a suicidal man books a
one-way flight to a war-torn country, but
instead of fulfilling his death-wish ac-
quires a fresh lease of life.
In “Miss Iceland”, her latest novel to ap-
pear in English—smoothly translated by
Brian FitzGibbon—the protagonist em-
barks on a journey of self-discovery when
she moves from her sparsely populated
home region to the capital. Her attempts to
settle down in a big city and achieve her
ambitions in a conservative world make for
an absorbing, bittersweet tale.
Hekla arrives in Reykjavik in 1963 with
grand plans to become a writer. Almost im-
mediately she is offered a different kind of
opportunity. A board member of the Reyk-
javik Beauty Society tells her it is looking
for “unattached maidens, sublimely en-
dowed with both clean-limbedness and
comeliness” to participate in the Miss Ice-
land contest. Hekla declines, but quickly
learns that men call the shots and value her
looks more than her literary talent.
One who doesn’t is her childhood friend
Jon John, who gives her a room of her own
in which to write. A gay man who wants to
make theatre costumes but instead en-
dures hard graft and homophobia on fish-
ing trawlers, he is one of several characters
stuck in a rut. Another is Isey, a housewife
who battles loneliness and domestic drud-
gery in her basement flat while her hus-
band is away. Determined to be different,
and desperate to leave behind the leering
and groping diners she serves in her wait-
ressing job, Hekla redoubles her efforts to
finish her manuscript and get published.
Praise from her boyfriend, a less gifted
writer, spurs her on: “You’re the glacier that
sparkles, I’m just a molehill.” However, as a
woman, she finds some avenues closed,
and she and Jon John decide to cut their
losses and search for freedom and artisticsuccessfartherafield.
Inpreviousbooks,MsAudurAvaOlafs-
dottiroccasionallyreliedtoomuchonec-
centricfoiblesandhare-brainedantics.In
“MissIceland”shejudiciouslydownplays
theoddities,particularlywhenexploring
weightyissuessuchassexualharassment
and discrimination. In other welcome
changes, she incorporates world events
andnumerousreferencestoIceland’srich
literature.Andyetthiscaptivatingnovel’s
finestcomponentisitsendearingheroine
who,atherjourney’send,haslearnedto
followherdreamsbutknowherlimits. 7Icelandic fictionLines of beauty
Miss Iceland.By Audur Ava Olafsdottir.
Translated by Brian FitzGibbon. Grove
Press; 256 pages; $16. Pushkin Press; £9.99Welcome to the big cityO
njuly2ndtheAmericanstateofGeor-
gia counted a total of 87,709 cases of co-
vid-19. Fifteen days later the number had
risen to 135,183. Yet the state government’s
online heat map looked largely the same.
There appeared to be no increase in the
number of crimson red areas where the
outbreak was most severe. How come?
As it turned out, the threshold for places
to turn red had been lifted from 2,961 cases
to 3,769. This example of misleading data
visualisation was called out by Carl Berg-
strom and Jevin West. It joined the ever-Understanding dataSums of all fears
Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a
Data-Driven World.By Carl Bergstrom and
Jevin West. Random House; 336 pages; $30.
Allen Lane; £20