The XXXII Olympiad may be year late, but the delay means that Tokyo will be able to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the first Games of the modern era, which were held in Athens in 1896. To mark this momentous occasion and the start of 16 days of top-class sport, Cinema Paradiso explores how film-makers have tackled the Olympics.
According to Aristotle, the Olympic Games were first held in 776 BC, while the last recorded staging of the classical era took place in AD 393. Held every four years, the events were as much a celebration of religion and culture as they were a test of sporting prowess, with sculptors, painters and poets gathering to honour both the gods and the victors.
Cinema Paradiso users can learn about the events that turned Koroibos of Elis and Leonidas of Rhodes into sporting heroes in The First Olympics: Blood, Honour and Glory (2012). But it's much more fun to witness the exploits of a couple of intrepid Gauls in Fréderic Forestier and Thomas Langmann's Asterix At the Olympic Games (2008), which became the most expensive non-Anglophone film of all time in adapting René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo's bestselling comic book about the efforts of Asterix (Clovis Cornillac) and Obelix (Gérard Depardieu) to help their friend Lovesix (Stéphane Rousseau) win the hand of Princess Irina (Vanessa Hessler).
Introduction to the Olympics in film
The victory ballads penned by the poets of Antiquity might have faded from the collective memory, but Baron Pierre de Coubertin was sufficiently stirred by these 'epinicians' to revive the Olympic Games at the end of the 19th century. He had been impressed by the Olympian Games launched at Much Wenlock in Shropshire in 1850 by William Penny Brookes. But, while Louis Jourdan played Coubertin in Alvin Rakoff's 1984 mini-series, The First Olympics: Athens 1896, nobody has yet made a biopic of Brookes, who is very much the forgotten man of the Olympic story.
At the same time that Coubertin was laying the foundations of the Olympic movement, various inventors in Europe and the United States were seeking to create moving pictures. In 1894, the ingenuity of William Kennedy Laurie Dickson enabled Thomas Alva Edison to present the earliest flickering images in Kinetoscope peep show machines at the same time that Coubertin was finalising details of the Olympiad that would be hosted by the restored Panathinaiko Stadium in Athens.
This landmark can be seen in the surviving film footage of the 1896 Games, as well as in King Otto (2021), Christopher André Marks's splendid account of how German maverick football manager Otto Rehhagel masterminded Greece's triumph at the 2004 European Championships. As the Olympic motto of 'Faster, Higher, Stronger' passed into the lexicon, cameras cranked in Paris in 1900, St Louis in 1904 and London in 1908. But only fragmentary highlights have survived from these events and it's only with Stockholm in 1912 that cinema and the Olympics forged a link whose legacy is yours to treasure if you have the odd £195 to spare, courtesy of 100 Years of Olympic Films, Criterion's imposing collection of 53 records of the 41 Summer and Winter Olympics held between 1912-2012.
Women were still forbidden from participating in the athletics events at Stockholm. But the last Olympics before the Great War produced two contrasting American heroes. George S. Patton competed in the Modern Pentathlon before beginning a career in the US Army that is commemorated in Franklin J. Schaffner's Patton (1970), which was scripted by Francis Ford Coppola and earned George C. Scott the Academy Award for Best Actor, which he declined.
A legal battle between Warner Bros and Columbia had prevented Patton's name from being mentioned in Ken Annakin's Battle of the Bulge (1965). But Columbia never got round to its version of the Ardennes Counter Offensive, despite announcing that John Wayne would play Patton alongside Van Heflin and David Niven as generals Eisenhower and Montgomery, and Laurence Olivier as Adolf Hitler.
The American to shine in Stockholm was Jim Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation who not only beat Patton in the Pentathlon, but also went on take the Decathlon title. Unfortunately, two seasons of semi-professional baseball prompted the International Olympic Committee to strip Thorpe of his titles. Once the IOC had finally come to its senses, the gold medals were presented to Thorpe's family 30 years after his death in 1953, just two years after he had been played by Burt Lancaster in Michael Curtiz's Jim Thorpe - All-American (1951). Frustratingly, like too many Olympic-themed pictures, this is not currently available on disc and we are still waiting for Angelina Jolie to direct Martin Sensmeier in Bright Path: The Jim Thorpe Story, which was announced back in 2018.
While Thorpe went on to excel across a range of sports, oarsman John B. Kelly got to see his daughter become a major star and marry into royalty. Having taken two medals at Antwerp in 1920, Kelly became the first rower to win three Olympic golds at Paris in 1924. Five years later, he fathered the third of his four children, with Grace Kelly going on to epitomise the Alfred Hitchcock blonde in Dial M For Murder, Rear Window (both 1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955). While filming the latter, she met Prince Rainier of Monaco and they are respectively played by Nicole Kidman and Tim Roth in Olivier Dahan's Grace of Monaco (2014).
When it comes to the VIII Olympiad, however, the focus inevitably turns to the athletes running in slow motion along a beach to Vangelis's anthemic theme in Hugh Hudson's Chariots of Fire (1981). After all, screenwriter Colin Welland did say that the British were coming! He played fast and loose with the facts in showing how sprinter Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross) received secret coaching from Sam Mussabini (Ian Holm) and how devout Scottish 400m runner Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson) refused to race on the Sabbath. But the film has come to epitomise cinema's view of the Olympic spirit, even though it has overshadowed the achievements of 'Flying Finn' Paavo Nurmi, who was the hero of Dustin Hoffman's character in John Schlesinger's adaptation of William Goldman's bestseller, Marathon Man (1976).
Olympians and Film-makers
Despite the fact that two epic documentaries were made about them, the 1928 Summer Games have rather slipped into anonymity. As we shall see below, however, the events in Amsterdam and St Moritz proved significant in other ways. Given that the 1932 Olympics took place on Hollywood's doorstep, it's surprising that more movies weren't made about the first Los Angeles Games. Produced and written by brothers Herman J. and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Edward F. Cline's Million Dollar Legs (1932) stars W.C. Fields (in his first picture for Paramount) as the President of Klopstokia, who leads his team to the X Olympiad in the hope of taking weightlifting gold.
Although E.A. Dupont's German saga, The Marathon Runner (1933), is not currently available, Cline's comedy is rentable from Cinema Paradiso as part of a double bill with A. Edward Sutherland's International House (1933), in which Fields plays Professor Henry R. Quall, who is staying at a large hotel in China in the hope of stealing a top secret radioscope.
Universal Studios reportedly sent camera crews to the Memorial Coliseum, but left the footage on the shelves until the 1980s. A key member of the backroom team working on James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) made his own piece of Olympic history, as make-up maestro Jack Pierce coached the Universal basketball team (nicknamed 'The Sure Passers') that made up part of the American squad that took gold at the Berlin Olympics of 1936. As the studio didn't approve of the trip, the players had to pay for their own tickets and their benefactors included Whale and Walter Lantz, the animator whose most famous creation was revived by Alex Zamm in Woody Woodpecker (2017).
Had Berlin not prevailed over Barcelona, the XI Olympiad would probably have had to have been cancelled because of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. In the event, Adolf Hitler got to preside over the opening ceremony in the Olympiastadion under the watchful gaze of the cameras meticulously positioned by Leni Riefenstahl, who fought battles with the IOC and Third Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to ensure that Olympia (1938) would be her artistic achievement and not solely a piece of political propaganda.
The story of the documentary's making can be found on Rüdiger Suchsland's excellent actuality, Hitler's Hollywood (2017). What is often overlooked, however, is that Riefenstahl was influenced in her approach by Dr Arnold Fancke, the pioneer of the Bergfilm genre (or 'Mountain Film'), who had transformed the way in which sporting action was photographed in The White Stadium (1928), his silent record of the Winter Games in St Moritz. Fanck had directed Riefenstahl in The Holy Mountain (1926) and, in the process, had shaped the aesthetic that would colour both The Blue Light (1932) and Triumph of the Will (1935), which did much to mythologise Hitler's image at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally.
Dividing Olympia into two parts - Festival of Nations and Festival of Beauty - Riefenstahl worked with production designer Walter Traut and cinematographers Walter Frentz and Hans Ertl to ensure the venues were built with trenches and platforms to accommodate the 30 cameras she used during the 16 days of competition. She then spent 18 months editing the 1,300,000 feet of footage she had amassed.
Accusations were levelled that she had used her film to glorify the Führer, but Riefenstahl insisted on including the successes of African-Americans Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalf and, as a consequence, was always welcomed back to the Games by the IOC, whose hierarchy was were so taken with her torch rally idea that it was retained for subsequent editions, although Covid has caused it to be abandoned for Tokyo 2020.
Of the other films linked to Berlin, the most topical saw detective Warner Oland's No.1 son (Keye Luke) compete at the Games in H. Bruce Humberstone's Charlie Chan at the Olympics (1937). In 1982, Jean-Paul Belmondo's French boxer took on Hitler (Günter Meisner) for menacing the family of a Jewish friend in Gérard Oury's Ace of Aces (1982), and anti-Semitism also proves key to the action in István Szabó's Sunshine (1999), a multi-generational saga that includes a section in which Ralph Fiennes leads the Hungarian fencing team at the 1936 Games.
Fact and fiction are capriciously muddled in Kaspar Heidelbach's Berlin 36 (2009), which claims that the Nazis conspired to prevent Jewish high jumper Gretel Bergmann (Karoline Herfurth) from triumphing in front of Hitler by adding the unknown Marie Ketteler (Sebastian Urzendowsky) to the team during training. Marie grows close to Gretel, as it's revealed that she is really a man in disguise. But the true story of Dora Ratjen (on whom Maria is based and who finished fourth in the event) is considerably more complicated.
Louis Zamperini set a new lap record in finishing eighth in the 5000m at Berlin, but it's his plight as a POW in the Pacific during the Second World War that dominates Angelina Jolie's Unbroken (2014). Adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen, William Nicholson and Richard LaGravenese from a book by Laura Hillenbrand, this harrowing picture sees Zamperini (Jack O'Connell) survive 47 days on a raft after a plane crash before being tortured in a Japanese camp. Samuel Hunt took on the role in Harold Cronk's sequel, Unbroken: Path to Redemption (2018), which reveals how becoming a born again Christian enabled Zamperini to cope with his post-traumatic stress issues.
The American who dominated the Berlin Games was, of course, Jesse Owens, who won gold medals in the 100m, 200m, 4x100m relay and the long jump. Dorian Harewood took the title role in Richard Irving's Emmy-winning teleplay, The Jesse Owens Story (1984), before Stephan James stepped up to the plate in Stephen Hopkins's Race (2016).
Less a celebration of Owens the athlete than an exploration of racial prejudice in the United States over the last 80 years, the film exposes the motives of Avery Brundage (Jeremy Irons) - the head of the US Olympic movement and a teammate of Thorpe and Patton in 1912 - and makes a point of showing Leni Riefenstahl (Carice van Houten) defying the Nazi Party line. Owens, who was never congratulated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, later claimed that he was shown more respect in Germany in 1936 than he was in his homeland. He remains an icon in athletics and Civil Rights circles, hence his name being mentioned in films as different as Brian Percival's The Book Thief (2013), Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017) and Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit (2019).
2012 and other memorable Olympic games
The 1940 Olympics had been awarded to Helsinki after the 1937 Japanese invasion of China had prompted the IOC to withdraw its invitation to Tokyo. However, the Second World War caused the Games to be cancelled, which cost Esther Williams the chance to swim for the United States. She found fame in a series of spectacular synchronised aquatic routines in such MGM showcases as Mervyn LeRoy's Million Dollar Mermaid (1952), in which Williams played controversial Australian swimming sensation, Annette Kellerman. The great Fanny Brice once said about Williams, 'Wet she's a star, dry she ain't,' but Cinema Paradiso users can judge for themselves in Harry Keller's thriller, The Unguarded Moment (1956).
War also meant that London had to wait four years to play host for the second time. Although they were nicknamed 'the Austerity Games', the sport and ceremonials looked equally splendid in the Technicolor used for the official film record, XIVth Olympiad: The Glory of Sport (1948). Contemporary critics carped that director Castleton Knight lacked Leni Riefenstahl's flair, but he was a safe pair of hands, as is clear from the fact that Cinema Paradiso users can rent two of his other outings, The Royal Wedding (1947) and A Queen Is Crowned (1953).
The undoubted star of the Games was 30 year-old mother of two Fanny Blankers-Koen, who became the first woman to win four golds at one Olympics. Yet no one has ever made a film about 'the Flying Housewife'. By contrast, the youngest gold medallist to date got to play himself in Francis D. Lyon's The Bob Mathias Story (1954), two years after he had secured his second consecutive decathlon title.
Huddled in front of the country's few TV sets, BBC viewers witnessed Britain come 12th in the medal table. But it wasn't until 2012 that Auntie commemorated the achievements of double scullers Bert Bushnell and Dickie Burnell in David Blair's Bert and Dickie, which starred Matt Smith and Sam Hoare. This isn't currently available on DVD, neither is Reema Kagti's Gold (2018), which chronicles how Tapan Das (Akshay Kumar) overcame the crises created by Partition to assemble an Indian hockey team for the 1948 Games.
Avant-garde documentarist Chris Marker is best known for such landmark works as La Jetée (1962) and Sans Soleil (1983), as well as the 11 short titles available on The Chris Marker Collection. What's often forgotten is that he made his feature bow with Olympia 52, which chronicled the Games in Helsinki. The standout of the Olympiad was undoubtedly Emil Zatopek, the so-called 'Czech Locomotive' who followed success in the 5000m and 10,000m with a victory in his first-ever marathon. He is set to be played by Vaclav Neuzil in David Ondricek's biopic, Zatapek, which is due for release some time this year.
The career of Indian sprinter Milka Singh (Farhan Akhtar) was celebrated by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra in Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013). But the Melbourne Games of 1956 are best remembered for the bloody water polo battle between Hungary and the Soviet Union, following the brutal suppression of an uprising in Budapest. Fifty years on, the match was relived in Colin Keith Gray and Megan Raney Aarons's documentary, Freedom's Fury, and Krisztina Goda's drama, Children of Glory (both 2006).
For home crowds, however, the star was Dawn Fraser, a maverick Sydneysider who became the first swimmer to win gold in the same event (100m freestyle) in three consecutive Olympics. Her unconventional story was told in Dawn!, which starred Bronwyn Mackay Payne and was directed by Ken Hannam, an Aussie whose contribution to British television can be explored via the Cinema Paradiso searchline.
Although Peter Whitchurch's Olympic Games 1956 was the official IOC record of the XIV Olympiad, Frenchman René Lucot also released The Melbourne Rendezvous (both 1956). However, the first film to focus on Melbourne was Frank Launder's quaint comedy, Geordie (1955), which joins Scottish laird Alastair Sim in marking the progress and the romantic entanglements of hammer thrower Geordie MacTaggart (Bill Travers).
The emphasis was also on comedy in Giorgio Bianchi's Le olimpiadi dei mariti (1960), which stars Ugo Tognazzi, who went on to headline Édouard Molinaro's La Cage aux folles (1978) and La Cage aux folles II (1980). However, spectacle was the order of the day in Romolo Marcellini's official record, The Grand Olympics (1961), which made glorious use of Technicolor and the Eternal City, which also provided the setting for Michael Winner's The Games (1970), which pounded the streets alongside marathon prospects Michael Crawford, Ryan O'Neal, Charles Aznavour and Athol Compton.
Echoes of Dawn Fraser's contretemps with authority can be heard in Megan Simpson Huberman's Alex (1993), which follows the efforts of headstrong New Zealand teenager Alex Archer (Lauren A. Jackson) to swim in Rome. The sacrifices involved in competing at the highest level are also laid bare in Vera Chytilová's Something Different (1963), which intercuts training footage of gymnast Eva Bosaková with the mundane daily grind experienced by a Czech housewife named Vera (Vera Uzelacová).
This was one of the key early works in the Czech Film Miracle (which is covered in Cinema Paradiso's Top 10 Czech Films article). But the big stars of Rome 1960 were heavyweight boxer Cassius Clay and barefoot Ethiopian marathon runner, Abiba Bikila. Having taken the name Muhammad Ali after converting to Islam, he played himself in Tom Gries's The Greatest (1977), which includes the seemingly mythical moment in which he threw his medal off the Second Street Bridge into the Ohio River after he had been refused service in a Louisville luncheonette because of the colour of his skin.
Ali would later be impersonated by Will Smith in Michael Mann's Ali (2001) and Eli Goree in Regina King's One Night in Miami (2020). The shepherd's son who became the first African to take gold is played by Rasselas Lakew in Davey Frankel's The Athlete (2009).
By repeating his triumph four years later, Bikila got to feature in Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad (1965), which is second only to Olympia in the ranks of official Games films for its use of telephoto lenses and super slow-motion. Sadly, this outstanding documentary is not currently available on disc, but Cinema Paradiso users can appreciate such other Ichikawa titles as Kokoro (1955), The Burmese Harp (1956), Alone Across the Pacific, An Actor's Revenge (both 1963), Princess From the Moon (1987) and 47 Ronin (1994).
Hopefully, these fine films also make up for the fact that it's not currently possible to see either Cary Grant (in his final film) getting involved in the 50km Walk in Charles Walters's Walk, Don't Run (1966) or Running Brave (1983), Donald Shebib's biopic of First American 10,000m winner Billy Mills. Cinema Paradiso users can, however, follow the complex fortunes of swimmer Tony Fingleton in Russell Mulcahy's Swimming Upstream (2003), which shows how Fingleton (Jesse Spencer) defied his father (Geoffrey Rush) to pass up the opportunity to swim in Japan in order to study at Harvard. Under the name Anthony Fingleton, he went on to co-script such different films as Ate De Jong's Drop Dead Fred (1991) and Rob Cohen's The Hurricane Heist (2018).
The 1968 Olympics in Mexico City took place against the same backdrop of student unrest that informs Alfonso Cuarón multiple Oscar winner, Roma (2018). These events didn't make it into Alberto Isaac's official record, The Olympics in Mexico (1969). But he did include the Black Power salutes given on the medal podium by Tommie Smith, John Carlos and Australian Peter Norman, a seismic incident that is recalled by the three sprinters in Matt Norman's Salute (2008).
The other stellar performers in Mexico (the first two of which appear in Salute) were American long-jumper Bob Beamon, flopping compatriot Dick Fosbury (who transformed the high jump with his revolutionary technique) and Czechoslovakian gymnast Vera Cáslavská, who recalls in Olga Sommerová's documentary, Vera 68 (2012), how she used her four gold medals to protest against the Soviet curtailment of the Prague Spring.
Dark Days and Fading Memories
Mexico City had been the first Games to be televised in colour. But a dark shadow descended over the 1972 Munich Olympics when 11 Israeli athletes were murdered in the village by members of the Palestinian terrorist group, Black September. Following in the wake of William A. Graham's teleplay, 21 Hours At Munich (1976), Kevin Macdonald pieced together the events in the Oscar-winning documentary, One Day in September (1999), while Steven Spielberg recreates the Mossad revenge mission known as Operation Wrath of God in Munich (2005).
The massacre also formed part of producer David Wolper's Visions of Eight (1973), which broke new ground for an official Olympic film by giving renowned film-makers Miloš Forman, Claude Lelouch, Yuri Ozerov, Mai Zetterling, Kon Ichikawa, John Schlesinger, Arthur Penn and Michael Pfleghar the freedom to explore an aspect of the competition that particularly intrigued them. It's a shame this fascinating experiment isn't available and the same is true of Going Vertical (2017), Anton Megerdichev's account of the basketball rivalry between the USA and the USSR, and two biopics of Steve Prefontaine, Steve James's Prefontaine (1997) and Robert Towne's Without Limits (1998), which respectively star Jared Leto and Billy Crudup, as the middle-distance runner who was killed in a car crash at the age of 24.
Soviet gymnasts Lyudmilla Turischeva and Olga Korbut (who would crop up in Bryan Buckley's The Bronze, 2015) were the darlings of the XX Olympiad. But they were supplanted at Montreal in 1976 by Romanian Nadia Comaneci, whose feat of achieving the first perfect 10 score (which she followed with six more) led to her being played by Leslie Weiner and Johann Carlo in Alan Cooke's 1984 TV-movie, Nadia.
Naturally, Comaneci also featured in the official record, Paul Cowan's Games of the XXI Olympiad (1977), although this 16mm fly on the wall offering was more about taking part than winning. Steven Hilliard Stern took this theme onboard in Running (1979), which follows the struggles of Michael Andropolis (Michael Douglas) to make the US marathon team and reach the finishing line. However, victory is very much the goal for the US female swimming quartet taking on the might of East Germany in Brian T. Brown's documentary, The Last Gold (2016), and for Cuban Alberto Juantorena, whose record-breaking 400m/800m double is noted in Mark Craig's Running For the Revolution (2020).
The irony was not lost on a watching world when Yuri Ozerov gave his official record of the 1980 Moscow Olympics the title, O Sport, You Are Peace! (1981). The Games had been boycotted by the United States and 65 other countries because of the Kremlin's invasion of Afghanistan, which meant that many of those competing in the Pan-American Games chronicled in Roberto Ponce's Orson Welles-narrated documentary, A Step Away (1980), would see their sporting dreams shattered.
Fans of cult Olympic flicks will be dismayed to hear that neither Joseph Sargent's Goldengirl (1979) nor Robert Towne's Personal Best (1982) is currently available to rent, even though Susan Anton and Mariel Hemingway respectively give committed performance as the super-athlete created by a Nazi doctor and a runner attracted to a male swimmer and a female rival. We'll also keep our fingers crossed that someone releases Chiu Keng Guan's Ola Bola (2016), which follows the fortunes of the Malaysian football team at the XXII Olympiad.
Some things never quite get round to happening, however. Seven years on, we are still waiting for Daniel Radcliffe to play Sebastian Coe in Gold, an account of his rivalry with Steve Ovett that had been scripted by Simon Beaufoy and was due to be directed by James Watkins after The Woman in Black (2012). In the meantime, Cinema Paradiso users can console themselves with 'The Rivalry' section of Golden Moments of the Olympic Games (2012), which also reflects on the 1984 decathlon tussle between Daley Thompson and Jürgen Hingsen.
The latter took place during the Los Angeles Olympics that were boycotted by the Soviet bloc in retaliation for Jimmy Carter's decision to snub Moscow. His policy seemed to have thwarted Tiff Wood's bid to row at the Games. But, as Masato Harada's Rowing Through (1996) reveals, he kept in shape and got his chance four years later. Gymnast Mitch Gaylord had also realised his ambition in LA and his newfound fame led to him being cast as an American football wannabe in Albert Magnoli's American Anthem (1986).
Once again, however, Hollywood proved indifferent to the global jamboree on its doorstep and it seems inconceivable that nobody made a TV-movie about golden girl Mary Decker's rivalry with Zola Budd, which was finally mulled over in Daniel Gordon's documentary, The Fall (2016). Indeed, Bud Greenspan's official record, 16 Days of Glory (1985), seemed to reflect a sense that the blanket television coverage made Olympic movies box-office poison. Consequently, it was 2016 before Vic Armstrong got round to telling show jumper Debi Walden's story in A Sunday Horse. Moreover, the integrity of the Games was also being damaged by the increasing use of performance-enhancing drugs. Yet, it was 2014 before Andrea Sedlácková's Fair Play tackled the issue in a drama about a teenage Czech sprinter and her ambitious mother.
Such was the audience burn-out that Carl Lewis was overlooked by film-makers, in spite of the fact he matched Jesse Owens's four-medal haul in LA. It was a different matter, however, when Canadian Ben Johnson decided to use foul means to beat Lewis in Seoul in 1988, as documentarist Daniel Gordon's recalls in 9.79* (2012). Johnson's country did secure a prestigious gold, however, when London-born boxer Lennox Lewis triumphed in the super heavyweight division. Yet, as he explains in Seth Koch and Rick Lazes's documentary, Lennox: The Untold Story (2020), he would drape in the Union Jack on turning professional.
Headlines were also made when diver Greg Louganis won double gold after banging his head on the springboard. Plans are supposedly afoot for a biopic to follow Steven Hilliard Stern's teleplay, Breaking the Surface (1997), and the Emmy-nominated documentary, Back on Board (2015). But, as we'll see in the companion piece, Thesping Olympians, Louganis joined a long line of medallists to seek a second career on the screen.
The contrasting experiences of sibling wrestlers Mark (Channing Tatum) and Dave Schultz (Mark Ruffalo) at the hands of sports fan and wealthy philanthropist John E. Du Pont (Steve Carell) caught the public imagination when it was recreated in Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher (2014), which accrued five Oscar nominations. Yet, despite Christopher Walken playing a ping-pong obsessive trying to exploit Ben Fogler after his fall from grace at the XXIV Olympiad, there were fewer takers for Robert Ben Garant's madcap sports comedy, Balls of Fury (2007).
Bruce Malmuth's Pentathlon (1994), Christian Duguay's Jappeloup (2013) and Adrian Sarwar's Shah (2015) have all similarly slipped out of the limelight, as has the official Olympic film, Hand in Hand (1989), even though it was directed by one of South Korea's finest film-makers, Im Kwon-taek, whose masterpiece, Drunk on Women and Poetry (2002), is available to rent from Cinema Paradiso.
Long May the Five Rings Fly
Not all of the films made about the Olympics are linked to actual events. Although the Games in Bryan Forbes's International Velvet (1978) are notionally taking place in 1980, Moscow is never mentioned as explicitly as the Aintree Grand National was in Clarence Brown's original adaptation of Edith Bagnold's novel, National Velvet (1944). It's also safe to assume that the Games that bring about the happy event in P.J. Hogan's Muriel's Wedding (1998) are the ones about to be held in Sydney, as the swimming authorities are so keen to secure the services of South African ace David Van Arkle (Daniel Lapaine) that they are prepared to pay Muriel Heslop (Toni Collette) $10,000 to help him become an Australian citizen.
No specific year is mentioned in discussions about the Olympics in Victor Salva's Peaceful Warrior (2006), which stars Scott Melchowiz and Nick Nolte and was based on the memoir of Dan Millman, who was in the minds of the gymnastics selectors in 1968 when he was injured in a motorcycle accident. Similarly, disappointment at failing to make an undated Olympic squad prompts Sarah Megan Thomas to turn down a reserve spot in Ben Hickernell's Backwards (2012). However, she learns to love rowing again when she starts coaching the crew at her old high school.
This was the first film to focus on women's elite rowing and it's somewhat surprising that garlanded British rowers like Katherine Grainger and Steve Redgrave haven't reached the big screen. The latter was in the middle of his remarkable gold-scooping career at Barcelona in 1992. But the Games rather failed to fire the imagination of the film-making community after Spanish maestro Carlos Saura directed the official film, Barcelona 1992 (1992), although The Other Dream Team (2012), Marius A. Markevicius's documentary profile of the Lithuanian basketball team is a notable exception.
Likewise, following Bud Greenspan's Atlanta 1996 (1996), the only notable picture linked to the XXVI Olympiad is Clint Eastwood's Richard Jewell (2019), which explores how the security guard who found a pipe bomb at Centennial Olympic Park became the FBI's chief suspect. Greenspan returned to helm Sydney 2000 (2000), as the Games went Down Under for a second time. Yet, despite the excellence of the sport on view, spin-off movies have been few and far between.
The fact that Laurence Billiet and Stephen Page's Freeman (2020) only emerged to mark the 20th anniversary of Cathy Freeman's nation-unifying 400m victory suggests that even the biggest Olympic stories need time to find their level in the age of rolling news and social media. Moreover, the deeds of those post-millennial Olympians who defy the odds to triumph tend nowadays to be celebrated in small-screen actualities, as fans identify so strongly with the leading athletes that they struggle to accept them being played by even the most skilled actors.
Not even the return of the Games to their spiritual home could generate more than Doug Rutt's official film, Olympic Games Athens 2004 (2004), and Yim Soon-rye's Forever the Moment (2008), which accompanied the South Korean women's handball team en route to the silver medal. The glories of acclaimed Fifth Generation director Zhang Yimou's opening ceremony were captured in Jun Gu's official film, The Everlasting Flame (2009). But if any features have been made about the Beijing 2008 experience, they have not caused much of an international ripple. The same is true of Rio 2016, which seems to be solely represented by Breno Silveira's official offering, Days of Truce (2016).
Thank goodness, therefore, for London 2012, although a bit of overlap has to be conceded in the case of some of its titles. The planning of the Games was the subject of the BBC's razor-sharp satire, Twenty Twelve (2012), although Hugh Bonneville's Ian Fletcher soon swapped his role as chief of the Olympic Deliverance Commission for the role of Head of Values at the Beeb in W1A (2014). As for Danny Boyle's spectacular opening ceremony, look no further than Caroline Rowland's official film, First, and the BBC's epic 15-hour overview of the entire 16 days, London 2012 Olympic Games (both 2012).
Not everyone approved of the event, however, and Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair made a highly distinctive protest by taking a swan pedalo from Hastings to Hackney in Swandown (2012). Sadly, this isn't available for rent. The same goes for Gun to Tape (2012), David Forbes's profile of Kenyan runners David Rudisha and Edna Kiplagat; Top Spin (2014), Mina T. Son and Sara Newens study of three teenage table tennis prodigies; and a trio of films about swimmers, Gregor Jordan's Ian Thorpe: The Swimmer (2012); Christo Brock and Grant Barbeito's Touch the Wall (2014; about Missy Franklin); and Brett Rapkin's The Weight of Gold (2020), in which Michael Phelps ponders the stress involved in winning 23 gold medals.
Nevertheless, we can relive the climax of Super Saturday in David Soutar's Mo Farah: No Easy Mile (2016) and marvel at the genius of Jamaica's most decorated sprinter in Gaël Leiblang's Usain Bolt: The Movie (2014) and Benjamin Turner's I Am Bolt (2016). Cinema Paradiso users can also look back at the most memorable moments of the summer's other sporting feast in the seven-hour compilation, London 2012 Paralympic Games.
Regrettably, subsequent events would forever tarnish the reputation of one of the stars of the Games, as documentarist Daniel Gordon recalls in The Life and Trials of Oscar Pistorius (2020). Let's hope for better stories from Tokyo 2020, whose official film will be in the very capable hands of Naomi Kawase, who has already demonstrated a painterly eye in such engaging dramas as The Mourning Forest (2007), Still the Water (2014) and Sweet Bean (2015), which are all available to savour on high-quality disc from Cinema Paradiso.
