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Sporting Shadows
The Tokyo 2020 Olympics, postponed to the summer of 2021, stick in the mind as the first Games held in near-empty stadiums. Yet while the trail of the Covid pandemic cast its pall over the event, a different kind of shadow loomed over the Games’ first week of competition.
US gymnast Simone Biles’ sudden exit from the women’s team competition, and subsequent departure from most of her individual events, offered the most striking evidence of the pressures felt by even – or especially – the world’s most high-profile and decorated athletes (Biles, expected for great things in Tokyo, had won four gold medals in Rio 2016). Biles’ withdrawal, on psychological grounds, was perhaps more notable for coming only weeks after Naomi Osaka – then the world’s number two-ranked female tennis player, and soon to be carrying the flag for Japan in Tokyo – pulled out of the French Open and Wimbledon, citing mental health reasons, before taking a hiatus from the professional tour.
The idea that Tokyo 2020 took place in empty arenas is, of course, somewhat misleading. Elite athletes like Biles and Osaka are always under the eye and scrutiny of an ever-watchful media audience in the hundreds of millions, and subject to what, arguably, is sport’s ever-intensifying relationship to this same media. While sports events and athletes’ participation in them is both determined and even demanded by media scheduling, the emergence of what are effectively franchise tie-in shows – series such as Netflix’s Break Point and Formula 1: Drive to Survive – have made the collusion between media and sport, and the expectations to perform, all the more apparent.
The Subject Behind the Star
If this media landscape forms some of its backdrop, one of the aims in my new book, Sport, Film, and the Modern World, recently published by Peter Lang, is to look at film’s role in both exploring and questioning these contexts of sporting performance. I consider what film might say, on the one hand, about the ideologies and cultures that encourage and produce elite athletes; and on the other, how film can be used to reveal the subject behind the sports ‘star’ – the individual, in other words, otherwise inaccessible to the TV cameras and sports broadcasting regimes.
Appropriately enough, Biles’ personal story of crisis and return is told this same month in Netflix’s Simone Biles: Rising; just in time for this summer’s Paris Olympics, even if a little too late for my book. But a version of Osaka’s story, in the form of an eponymous Netflix mini-series (shot by award-winning documentary filmmaker Garrett Bradley), appeared just a month after her public admission of mental-health concerns. This coincidence inevitably shapes our viewing and understanding of Bradley’s intimate film. But in some respects Naomi Osaka is revealing enough on its own, choosing to cast its focus away from the glitz of tournament play and success, focusing more – via lingering cameras and home-movie footage – on Osaka’s ceaseless training regime, publicity commitments and endorsements. It’s the portrait of a sportswoman as a kind of commodity, in other words, offering at the same time a glimpse into the person, and the psyche, behind the image.
A key focus in my book is the way, in fact, recent documentaries – works such as Zidane: A Portrait of the 21st Century (2006), or Asif Kapadia’s Senna (2010) and Diego Maradona (2019) – have used conventions of fiction filmmaking (mainly, through the use of suggestive editing, close-up cameras and experimental sound mixes) in order to evoke ‘subjective’ experience and point of view: an increasingly frequent tendency, I suggest, in cinema’s growing concern with the tough realities behind sporting lives. One question this approach raises, in fact, along with the examples of Biles and Osaka, is what we might understand by the value, ethics, or more broadly the ‘ends’ of sport, once it crosses the line from play to professionalism, and then to the subjection of the body to forms of physical and emotional violence. The latter, arguably, is inseparable from modern sport, and the modern Olympic Games especially, with its motto of faster, higher, stronger. This creed, as John Hoberman suggests in his seminal study Mortal Engines, sustained a drive to extend through sport the limits of the human, almost by any means necessary: the Games, in other words, as a “gigantic biological experiment”. (1)
Olympic Victims
This experiment still has its casualties. The quadruple jump landed by 15 year-old figure skater Kamila Valieva, on her way to winning a team gold medal, was a high point of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Yet just a few days later, Valieva was under the spotlight for very different reasons, when a drug test revealed banned substances in her system. The generally sympathetic media response to Valieva’s misadventures (though her four-year competitive ban would eventually be upheld) seemed premised on her extreme youth. The fault, it was implied, was with a Russian sporting system already tainted by doping allegations and banned, at that time, from fielding athletes under the national flag. Such perspectives might be further informed by films such as Marta Pruz’s Over the Limit (2017), focusing on the Russian rhythmic gymnast Margarita Mamun, in the run-up to the 2016 Rio Games. Pruz’s masterstroke (*spoiler alert*) is to show, in intensive and uncomfortable detail, the verbal, emotional, and near-physical abuse endured by Mamun – only at the end, to deliberately not show Mamun’s success in winning the individual title, restricting the information to a blank piece of text. By downplaying the glory, Over the Limit both shines a light on the price of winning gold, and asks whether such achievements are ultimately worth the cost.
As I consider in my book, however, we also need to look at a wider, and less obvious contexts to understand the broader ethical implications of the Olympic sporting dream. I, Tonya (2017), for example, a biopic of the disgraced ice-skater Tonya Harding, focuses on a figure easily ridiculed both for her abrasive, even ‘trashy’ style, as well as for her supposed involvement in a piece of tabloid criminality (the physical attack, planned by Harding’s husband, on a rival skater). I, Tonya is nevertheless notable for its reminder that the pursuit of success is woven into the fabric of the working-class American life in which Harding was raised. More significantly, though – in its focus on a pre-school Tonya being effectively pushed onto the ice by her ambitious mother – that this relentless drive is also, by necessity, something that female athletes above all must pursue from very early infancy. This is especially the case in sports such as skating and gymnastics, where female performers (like Valieva, or Biles, also 15 at the start of her competitive career) peak young. Even if her end result proved more nightmarish, Harding’s pursuit of the sporting dream – and the committing of children to extreme training programmes – is one that underpins all stories of sporting success: a fact we as a global sports audience might tacitly accept, whether we realise it or not.
Beyond the Finish Line
Moving forward, one of my main interests in this summer’s Olympics, and a likely subject for future research, will focus on different kinds of ‘ends’: namely, what happens to elite athletes at the culmination of their sporting lives, and what kind of cinematic narratives and forms might represent this transition? The Scottish tennis player Andy Murray, a three-time Grand Slam champion, is likely to end his twenty-year professional career in Paris. This will mark a suitable dénouement for a great player who also won back-to-back Olympic titles in 2012 and 2016. But after Paris, what comes next?
As I’ve recently pondered elsewhere (2), this same question lies at the troubling heart of Federer: Twelve Final Days (2024), recently released on Amazon Prime, which raises the notion of the elite athlete ‘dying twice’: the first death occurring when competition ends, and at an age that is for most others the prime of life, obscurity and empty days beckon. It’s the same question that haunts the earlier Andy Murray: Resurfacing (2019), which candidly records the player’s physical struggle to continue performing at the top level, and the equally painful existential questions accompanying it. In both films, we get to witness the material wealth and space afforded to such sportsmen at the very height of the sport. But at the same time, the film asks us to reflect on how these same environments will be filled, once each man can no longer do what has defined them and shaped their daily routines for almost their whole lives.
It’s not the place of the Olympic Games themselves, of course, to engage with these issues. The limitation of the popular sporting narrative, I would suggest, as too with many sports films over the years, is that both culminate with the moment of triumph – though without asking what the pursuit of victory may have cost, or what may be lost when the crowd has dispersed. And it’s here, as my work explores, that the imaginative resources of film step in to explore the gap.
A final thought on this same point: “I’m almost too frightened to win”. So says Ben Cross’s Harold Abrahams, minutes before the 100 metres sprint final in Chariots of Fire (1981), set during the previous Paris Games exactly one hundred years ago. It’s an enigmatic but increasingly suggestive line, reminding us that winning gold is not the end, but the beginning of something else. But it’s a reminder, too, that winning is also an achievement that may raise more questions – about the routes one takes to get there, and how these matter – than those it answers.
(1) John Hoberman, Mortal Engines: The Science of Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport (New York: The Free Press, 1992), p. 84.
(2) ‘You Only Live Twice’, More Than Coping,25 June 2024, https://morethancoping71.blog/2024/06/25/you-only-live-twice/
