The worst cinematic sporting sequence I have ever seen comes from the 1952 British movie The Card. It features a centreforward who runs the length of the field, riding what appears to be 15 tackles, before coolly – and ridiculously – beating the goalkeeper to score.
But there is plenty of competition for this title. The difficulty in crafting a decent sports movie is that athletes spend many years perfecting skills that an actor is expected to master in six weeks. In the age of saturation television coverage, with every shot, serve or kick replayed in super slow motion, it is embarrassingly simple to spot the difference between Roger Federer’s forehand and that of Paul Bettany in Wimbledon.
These issues may explain the growth market in sporting parodies over the last decade, most of them starring Will Ferrell (Semi-Pro, Blades of Glory). This year, though, has turned up a more interesting phenomenon. We are seeing the renaissance of the sporting documentary.
Over the next two months, four new “jock docs” will be released in our cinemas. Two of them concern cricket: From the Ashes (about Ian Botham’s great Aussie-bashing series of 1981) and Fire In Babylon (which puts the great West Indian side of that same era into a political context).
The other two are set in the world of motorsport: Senna – a biography of Formula One’s most gifted driver – and TT3D: Closer to the Edge, which will be the first of the quartet to go on general release when it opens on Friday.
TT3D presented perhaps the greatest technical challenge, as it was filmed at a live event last summer, whereas the others retell stories from the last century. The cameras followed a group of absurdly fearless motorcyclists, led by Wolverine lookalike Guy Martin, as they negotiated what many petrol heads believe to be the greatest racetrack on Earth: the Snaefell Mountain Circuit on the Isle of Man.
“It is very difficult to make a decent sports movie,” says TT3D’s producer Steve Christian. “I had a go with a biopic of George Best a few years ago but it was a long way from the real thing. Because I’m a producer from the Isle of Man, I get six to eight scripts for the TT race every year but I’ve never yet seen one that would do justice to it. So rather than fake it, we decided just to cover it as an event, because something spectacular always happens.”
There are few dramas that match TT3D when it comes to thrills and sickening spills. The on-board helmet-cams and the helicopter shots bring home just how narrow the margins are, especially around the 170mph Ballagarey corner. Make a mistake, and the safety barriers won’t help out, because there aren’t any – just stone walls, trees and fields.
Although the project was always conceived to run in 3D, Christian says he was keen not to overdo the effects. “I didn’t want bikes jumping out of the screen, because that would have been gimmicky,” he says, “and I didn’t want too much on-board footage because people would have been sick in their seats.
“The idea was to use the 3D as an invitation to the trackside, in all its gritty glory. Most motorsport films look like corporate videos, full of gleaming bodywork and 'brolly dollies’, but we wanted ours to be more authentic.”
Despite covering events that took place two decades ago, Senna achieves a similar sense of immediacy through images drawn entirely from contemporary footage. The director, Asif Kapadia, did not shoot a single reel, although he did record some interviews to lay over the visuals.
“I didn’t use talking heads because that gives you a feeling of hindsight,” he says. “I wanted the viewers to feel that they were watching events unfold in front of them, because uncertainty is the essence of sport. That’s why I loved all the glitches in the footage and the dirt on the camera: they make it real.
“Something happens to sport when you dramatise it,” Kapadia believes. “You could show Liverpool coming back to win the 2005 Champions League final from a 3-0 deficit and suddenly no one would believe it.”
This exact problem afflicted last year’s boxing saga The Fighter. Mark Wahlberg (playing the real-life welterweight Micky Ward) went out and won his fights in such an unlikely manner that many viewers came out scoffing at what they thought was typical Hollywood exaggeration.
But when I went back over the original footage, I realised that the actors had mirrored every punch and movement with impressive accuracy. What had seemed risible in the cinema was compelling in its original state.
The Fighter, which won Oscars for best supporting actor (Christian Bale) and actress (Melissa Leo) was actually highly watchable for the most part, confirming that the close-quarters sport of boxing is far easier to bring to life than team games like football and rugby.
But a hack director can twist any sport into the same familiar formula: a talented slacker twigs that hard work can turn him into a champion, hires a craggy, gum-chewing coach and goes through a montage training sequence before lifting the trophy in the final reel.
The desire to escape such clichés may explain why directors like Kapadia (who normally works in drama) is turning to real life for his inspiration. As Senna proves, the best tales from sport are not just stranger than fiction; they are richer too.
TT3D: Closer to the Edge is out on Fri, followed by From the Ashes on May 10, Fire in Babylon on May 20 and Senna on June 3
