12 Must-See Documentaries About Sporting Greats
What’s so special about sport? Whole weekends revolve around watching it in the pub or participating in it on a Sunday morning. Some people devote their lives to getting really good at it. But, we’d have to say the most magical thing is the stories that come from it.
Camaraderie, hard work, and glory, all instilled into a single moment – a knockout punch, crossing the finishing line, a 40-yard screamer into the top right-hand corner.
It’s quite telling that in other genres – romance for example – fiction is king. But apart from Rocky (always, and forever), the most captivating tales in sport are those that are curiously, beautifully true. Here we’ve curated 12 of the most interesting and inspirational sports documentaries out there.
12 Sports Documentaries To Stream Right Now
The Last Dance
The beauty of this doc is that like the Chicago Bulls team Jordan led, it’s the sum of its parts that make it great. Leading up to the 1997-1998 season, the Chicago Bulls have won five NBA championships in seven years. But with contract disputes and retirement likely breaking up the team at the end of the season, this is almost certainly going to be their last hurrah.
The show splices up footage from the season with an elongated back-story that stretches back to a decade of hurt for the Bulls through the ’80s, and a moment of tragedy suffered by Jordan, all of which go some way to explaining his unique drive and determination.
Jordan is the G.O.A.T., but it took the addition of fellow hall-of-famers Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman to make the Chicago Bulls great alongside him. Greatness then is less a path tread alone, as it is one made together.
Available to stream on Netflix.
Icarus
The definition of a snowball effect, Icarus begins with the film’s maker and keen amateur-cyclist, Bryan Fogel, attempting to improve his performances in training with the help of Grigory Rodchenkov, the director of Russia’s national anti-doping laboratory, and a tasting platter of hardcore performance-enhancing drugs.
The improvements are slight, but just as the doc starts to flounder, that’s when things start to get interesting. An international conspiracy unravels which eventually leads to Russia’s disqualification from the Olympics, a worldwide manhunt, and Rodchenkov’s life put in serious (and we mean, serious) danger. Part sports documentary; part gritty crime thriller – Icarus is a sophisticated and multi-layered slow-burner that went on to pick up an Oscar for best documentary feature.
Available to stream on Netflix.
In Search Of Greatness
Greatness is a regular touchstone in the sports documentary genre. But what exactly is it?
Through original interviews with three famous sporting ‘greats’ – Wayne Gretzky, Jerry Rice, and Pelé – this film attempts to chart greatness from the very beginning.
Is it a 7-year-old Gretsky watching hockey games and with a drawing of the rink in front of him tracing the path of the puck without looking or Rice tossing his football up in the air in bed to learn how to intuit where the ball would be even if he could not see it?
Greatness it seems then, is in the details. The film also makes an argument for creativity over physical prowess, pointing to undefeated heavyweight champion, Rocky Marciano, and his 68-inch reach (to put that in perspective, the current champ, Tyson Fury has a reach of 85 inches). Greats then, don’t have to be born great; they just have to earn it.
Available to stream on Amazon Prime.
Sunderland ‘Til I Die
Context is everything in Sunderland ‘Til I Die, a behind-the-scenes look into the running of Sunderland F.C.
The club’s fortunes echo those of the city in a curious way. Once ‘the greatest shipbuilding port in the world’, Sunderland is now one of the most deprived areas in the UK. Similarly, the club that bears the cities name was once a ‘moderately’ successful club with a monolithic stadium to boot. But with their last major trophy coming in 1973, and now languishing in the third tier of English football, it’s glory days are long gone.
Sunderland ‘Til I Die then juxtaposes the lives of the big money men who come in to try and restore those days (and the riches that come with it) with those of the supporters who simply want to recover that lost pride within their club and city. It’s an affecting watch, that’ll make a Sunderland fan out of almost anyone (apart from Newcastle supporters of course).
Available to stream on Netflix.
Senna
Iconic enough to recognise from just his mononym, this documentary builds up the Formula One superstar’s myth with archive footage tracing his legendary rivalry with fellow driver and Senna’s polar opposite, Alain Prost, and his three extraordinary championship victories.
The denouement of the film, Ayrton Senna’s tragic death at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, is now a well-known piece of history. But the documentary takes great pains to then look beyond that myth. What they find makes the story even more touching.
Years after his death, it was revealed that Senna had secretly donated an estimated $400 million of his personal fortune to help poor children in his native Brazil. This was a man who used his greatness to help others, and that in itself is enough to make him a different sort of great to all the rest.
Available to stream on Amazon Prime.
When We Were Kings
The 1996 Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature, When We Were Kings, takes us to 1974, and Zaire (now D.R. Congo), as Muhammed Ali prepares for his biggest test to date, a fight with ‘Big’ George Foreman.
Billed as the ‘Rumble In The Jungle’, the resulting fight is quite possibly the greatest duel boxing will likely ever see. The maverick Ali is at the height of his greatness here, talking smack like a seasoned street poet (“Only last week I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalised a brick. I’m so mean I make medicine sick.”) in between break-downs of his ingenious ‘rope-a-dope’ tactic.
It’s often forgotten how feared Foreman was during this era, and Ali was a firm outsider. But with brains, bravery, and bucketloads of charisma, he wrote himself down in history as the greatest there ever was. And here it is; all on tape.
Available to stream on Amazon Prime.
Free Solo
Here’s one for the adrenaline obsessed. Free Solo documents climber Alex Honnold’s quest to conquer El Capitan in 2017 – a 3,000ft-high formation in Yosemite Valley, California. The beautifully shot journey of Honnold to its summit rightfully bagged it an academy award in 2019, and it’s as much a documentation of the intense and meticulous detail with which adventure pursuits like this are filmed as it is the climb.
The mountaineering genre lends itself to the storytelling format and is full of incredible watches. For more like Free Solo, check out the director’s previous effort Meru or the riotous counterculture tale housed within Valley Uprising.
Available to stream on Disney Plus.
Losers
Sometimes greatness isn’t thrust upon you in a blaze of glory. In fact for the eight athletes profiled in each episode of this sports documentary series, an inherent lack of glory is their shared trait. But that only serves to make their stories more interesting.
Take golfer Jean Van De Velde for example. A huge rank outsider going into the 1999 Open Championship, he plays wonderfully before arriving at the final hole of the tournament needing only a double bogey six to become the first Frenchman since 1907 to win a major tournament. Miss-hit after miss-hit follows. The greatest capitulation ever caught on camera. The victory eventually goes to Scotsman Paul Lawrie.
20 years later, does the moment still haunt Van De Velde? Not a jot. Life goes on. C’est la vie. Sure you can admire Jordan or Ali’s greatness in victory, but sometimes that graciousness in defeat is almost just as beautiful to see.
Available to stream on Netflix.
The Battered Bastards Of Baseball
The Battered Bastards Of Baseball plays just like an uplifting sports comedy as a loveable rag-tag bunch of failed ball players make their way to Portland, Oregan, where owner Bing Russell (himself a former actor who could never fully crack Hollywood) is holding open tryouts for new minor league team Portland Mavericks.
Playing five seasons in the Class A-Short Season Northwest League, from 1973 through 1977, the Mavericks were also an independent team, a rarity in minor leagues, playing without the affiliation of a parent team in the major leagues.
What follows is an underdog story that you can’t believe Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson haven’t been tapped up to star in; a loveable, anti-establishment sports documentary that transcends the game.
Available to stream on Netflix.
Rising Phoenix
The road to the Olympics games is a gruelling one; you don’t get to the pinnacle of human accomplishment for nothing after all. But what if you turned that odds nob to a hundred? Well, then you’d be getting somewhere close to the path a Paralympian has to run, leap and push through. This stirring sports documentary chronicles those journeys with two standing out.
First, there’s French long-jumper Jean-Baptiste Alaize who competes with an amputated tibia and witnessed his mothers killing during the Burundi genocide at age three before ending up in a French orphanage.
Then there’s Italian wheelchair fencer Beatrice Vio (the film’s aforementioned Rising Phoenix), who at age 11 was affected by meningitis so severe it resulted in the loss of both her legs from the knee, and both her arms from the forearms.
These are impossible odds in a field of impossible odds; their success defies superlatives.
Available to stream on Netflix.
30 for 30
30 for 30 was originally made for the 30th anniversary of sports channel ESPN, with 30 one-hour sports documentaries from 30 different film-makers. First aired in 2009, there have now been over 150 episodes made.
A focus on US collegiate sport can be alienating for non-Americans, but the best films tend to be those that tackle stories with a bigger picture in mind. Take The Two Escobars which traces the story of two of Colombia’s most prominent public figures – drug kingpin Pablo and soccer star Andres (the eponymous Escobars) – and a connection beyond their surnames that leaves an indelible mark on the nation.
Or Catching Hell by legendary documentarian Alex Gibney, which looks at the moment Chicago Cubs fan Steve Bartman accidentally hauls in a foul ball before his team’s outfielder, costing his beloved Cubs a World Series. Bartman is made a pariah in an ugly sequence of events that makes us re-evaluate our own fandom for the teams and sports we love. Both are simply gripping.
Available to stream on Youtube TV.
The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young
There are marathons, which are already tough enough if you ask anyone who’s actually ran one, and then there’s ultra-marathons. One of the most notorious is the Barkley Marathons, a trail race set over 100 miles with 54,200 feet of accumulated vertical climb through its duration. That’s about an Everest, twice over. As of 2019, only 15 runners have ever completed it.
The insanity of the herculean task is fully encapsulated in this doc, including the rag-tag bunch of characters that surround it (potential entrants must submit a personal essay to course designer Lazarus “Laz” Lake, along with the registration fee of $1.60, a pack of Camel cigarettes and anything else Lake can throw at them). You can’t help but admire the insane drive of the entrants, even if one particularly gruesome blister popping scene won’t inspire you to join them.
Available to stream on Amazon.
