Athletics is the sport most of us did in some form at school, then probably never thought about again until an Olympic year rolled around.

There is something about a slow-motion shot of someone going round a bend at twenty-five miles per hour, however, or footage of a marathon field grinding through the final five miles, that pulls people back in every four years, whether they like it or not.

The rhythm of it is unlike any other sport, with a lot of the drama compressed into a handful of seconds and a lot of the suffering spread out across whole afternoons.

The films on this list go after that contrast from quite different angles, from a small Ethiopian town that has produced four Olympic gold medallists, through to the story of Roger Bannister running a mile in less then four minutes and the athletics equivalent to Drive to Survive.

Town of Runners

Bekoji is a small town in the Arsi region of southern Ethiopia where, statistically, you are more likely to win an Olympic distance medal than almost anywhere else on earth.

Jerry Rothwell’s 2012 documentary spends three years there, following two teenage girls, Hawii and Alemi, as they train at altitude under the local PE teacher Sentayehu Eshetu, who has somehow developed Tirunesh Dibaba, Kenenisa Bekele and Derartu Tulu out of the same primary school yard. What gives the film its weight is that Rothwell is not really making a sports documentary. The story is at least as much about the girls’ families and the village economy in general.

In Town of Runners, Rothwell explores what it actually costs to chase a future that depends entirely on getting into a national training camp. The running footage is beautiful, but the slow-burn observation of two ordinary teenagers waiting to find out whether their lives are about to change is what stays with you.

Given the fact that so many Olympic medalists have come out of the town, you can forgive the girls and their loved ones from putting so many eggs into one basket. They aren’t the only ones either, with the town being described as being ‘crazy about running’, which might well be the biggest understatement of all.

Fire on the Track: The Steve Prefontaine Story

Steve Prefontaine’s face has been on Nike posters and Eugene t-shirts for so long that most of the people who recognise him probably couldn’t tell you why. Made in 1995 and narrated by the novelist Ken Kesey, Fire on the Track: The Steve Prefontaine Story is the documentary that fills the gap in the knowledge of the average Joe.

He was the long-haired Oregon distance runner who held every American record from 2,000 to 10,000 metres at the time of his death in a car crash in 1975, aged just twenty-four. The film looks to trace the years from his small-town childhood to his unfinished prime, not shying away from the tragedy at its end.

At fifty-eight minutes, it is short and a little rough around the edges, but the line-up of interviews more than makes up for it. Bill Bowerman, Frank Shorter, Lasse Viren and Alberto Salazar all turn up to talk about him. So does Dana Carvey, which is the kind of casting decision that no documentary would risk now.

The documentary’s 1995 premiere came just before coverage of the Prefontaine Classic that year, which is a race that welcomes entrants even now and is run in his honour. Given Prefontaine’s ability to set records in seven different distance events, it is only right that he is remembered through the running of one.

Boston: An American Running Story

The Boston Marathon is a sporting event that, for most non-Americans, is now inseparable from the 2013 bombing. Jon Dunham’s 2017 documentary, Boston: An American Running Story, is a useful corrective to that, working its way through 120 years of the world’s oldest annual marathon, starts in 1897 and ends with Meb Keflezighi’s emotional 2014 win the year after the attack.

The very first running of it saw fifteen men shuffling out of Hopkinton, showing just how far things have come in the years that have followed. Matt Damon narrates, which gives the film a certain Boston-accented gravity, whilst Jeff Beal’s score does a fair amount of the lifting.

The middle stretch on Kathrine Switzer breaking the gender barrier in 1967 is genuinely moving, with the more recent material on the 2013 attack and the city’s response being handled with more restraint than you might expect. It is the kind of documentary that will turn anyone who watches it into a marathon spectator the following spring.

Variety covered the announcement of Damon’s involvement, which offers a bit of context on how the film came together. This is a film made by those who love Boston and who have been keen runners in the past, such as Executive Producer Frank Marshall, who ran the marathon in 1980.

9.79*

The men’s 100 metres final at the 1988 Seoul Olympics is still, depending on how you count, the most infamous race ever run. Ben Johnson crossed the line in 9.79, took the gold medal and was stripped of it within seventy-two hours after testing positive for stanozolol.

Daniel Gordon’s 2012 documentary, made for the ESPN 30 for 30 strand, goes back to that race and interviews all eight finalists to get their take on what happened. The decision to strip Johnson of gold is what lifts the film above the standard rise-and-fall sports documentary and, by the time Gordon is done, five of the eight runners are linked to performance-enhancing drugs.

On this day, in 1988, Ben Johnson ran the fastest 100m till then – 9.79*

3 days later – he tested positive for Stanzolol

If you haven’t yet, watch the ESPN documentary on what was the ‘Dirtiest Race In History’ (Richard Moore’s book with the same title is a fantastic read too) pic.twitter.com/QMDlxwvb9D

— Aniket Mishra (@aniketmishra299) September 24, 2020

That was at some point in their careers, including Carl Lewis, which complicates the neat story the world told itself about Johnson in 1988. Nowadays, there is a sense from many that Johnson’s misfortune wasn’t in doping, but in getting caught for it.

Not all of the runners went on to have easy lives after the end of the Olympics, which is something that is covered well in the film. It is also proof, such as it is, that doping alone isn’t the only reason why an athlete might struggle to adapt to life away from the running circuit. The film came out at around the same time as Lance Armstrong’s doping was revealed, giving it another layer altogether.

Bannister: Everest on the Track

On the 6th of May 1954, on a windy afternoon at Oxford’s Iffley Road track, Roger Bannister ran a mile in three minutes fifty-nine and four-tenths of a second, becoming the first person ever to break the four-minute barrier.

Tom Ratcliffe and Jeremy Mosher’s 2016 documentary, Bannister: Everest on the Track, goes back to that race and the years of postwar austerity that led up to it, with Bannister himself sitting for what would turn out to be one of his last extended interviews before his death in 2018. The film is a properly grown-up piece of British sporting history and there are contributions from Chris Chataway, who paced Bannister on the day.

RIP Sir Roger Bannister, an amazing man. Check out “Bannister: Everest on the Track” documentary. Superb story of his quest to break 4:00 mile and post-war Britain. pic.twitter.com/BVjdOwazna

— Bob Vorwald (@BobVorwald) March 4, 2018

We also hear from the Australian rival John Landy, who broke the record only forty-six days later, and from Sebastian Coe and Steve Cram on what the barrier still means to anyone who has run on a track. The Iffley Road race is placed in the context of a Britain less than a decade out of the war, which gives the story a weight that a straight athletics film would never quite manage.

World Athletics covered the film’s win at the FICA festival, which goes to show the strength of the piece, but it is how it covers that record-breaking run that will be of interest to most. Countless people have broken it since, but it was presumed to be impossible before Bannister made history.

Sprint: The World’s Fastest Humans

Athletics has long been jealous of Formula 1’s Netflix moment. Sprint: The World’s Fastest Humans, made by Box to Box Films, who are the same lot behind Drive to Survive, is an attempt to put it right.

The series follows the world’s fastest sprinters across a season of Diamond League meetings, the World Championships and, in the second instalment, the Paris Olympics, with full access to the likes of Noah Lyles, Sha’Carri Richardson, Letsile Tebogo and Julien Alfred, amongst others. It is a good watch, irrespective of whether you’re a massive fan of athletics or you only tend to take a passing interest in it when the Olympics is on the television.

Whether it pulls the same audiences that F1 managed remains to be seen, but the format works on athletics in a way it probably wouldn’t for, say, the shot put. Lyles in particular is excellent television, willing to talk and rarely entirely on-message, whilst the second series covers the Paris Olympics including the men’s 100m photo finish that needed a thousandth of a second to settle.

As you can probably tell from the films on the list, the running disciplines tend to take the focus whenever the Olympics rolls around, with Sprint offering the kind of insight into the sport that explains exactly why so many people are fascinated by it.