An excerpt from my book, Cycling and Cinema, taken from Chapter four, ‘Sport and Performance Machines’, pp. 91-94
Vive le Tour (Louis Malle, 1962)
Heroes and Villains
Cycle races lend themselves to narrativisation by film-makers in various ways. Individual races are self-contained narratives organised around the quest for a goal, and these independent narratives are woven into a complex mesh of ongoing narratives that include the progress and decline of individual riders, the unfolding of a sequence of races across a season and the historical development of the sport. Consequently, as documents of staged performances, sport documentaries have an interstitial status, located somewhere between fiction film and cinéma-vérité . Like concert movies or filmed stage plays, they remind us of the inadequacy of the commonplace assumption that the documentary is, or should be, an objective record of reality.
Interviewed in 2003 about filming cycle racing, Danish director Jørgen Leth reflects:
‘I always thought it was a fantastic sport with great stories, and I always thought it deserved better than lousy sports journalism. I thought it deserved to be sung about in big, epic films… So, I’m simply telling the stories that I see in the sport, and I know that I’m projecting certain values into the sport, but I think they are there…. I’m talking about mythological values, and the heroes and villains, and the good and the bad…. For me, it’s…the material of great storytelling.’
Leth’s dismissal of journalism is less persuasive now that television coverage of certain cycling races is so comprehensive, incorporating high-resolution video from a dynamic constellation of cameras on helicopters, motorcycles and cars, and even ‘onboard’ cameras mounted on the racers’ bicycles, all relayed instantly by satellite. The superimposition of continually updated statistical data on the screen, accompanied by an almost continual audio commentary, reinforces the impression of omniscient, panoramic visuality, the sense that this density of data ensures that we can see (and know) everything that is happening. However, the crucial distinction between cinema and journalism lies not so much in cinema’s superior narrative capacity as it does in the medium’s limited capacity to reproduce the experience of contingency. While cinema is perfectly suited to restaging the ritualised drama of sport, what it cannot reproduce is liveness – the ever- present possibility of unexpected occurrences and the viewer’s sense of participation in a collective event. Although a documentary can record a surprising event, such as the disruption of the Paris– Roubaix race by striking print workers in Leth’s A Sunday in Hell (Leth, 1976), or Ole Ritter’s failure to break the hour record in The Impossible Hour (Leth, 1974), once it has been recorded and is replayable it becomes a component of the filmed narrative, as if it had been scripted and staged. As Hibai López- González argues, sport’s theatrical spectacle involves ‘the tension between the scripted elements of the show and the open-to-improvisation elements of it. A fully theatrical version of sport would have been perceived as a forgery, a deception of the sports ethos.’ Viewed on screen – and especially in retrospect – the distinction between accident, improvisation and rehearsed action becomes increasingly indiscernible – and in some cases, perhaps, the full, stage- managed, deceptive theatricality of sport also becomes visible – and the thrill of spectatorship is muted. Leth is correct that cinema can enhance the narrative drama of sport, but in so doing neglects the gripping contingency of the viewing experience.
The Impossible Hour (Leth, 1974)
Media Sports
In a broader sense, competitive cycling is already thoroughly mediated – a spectacular attraction designed for consumption through various media, both ‘live’ in real time and in retrospect through newspapers, periodicals, radio and television, as well as literary and autobiographical accounts. One feature of the current bicycle boom is the substantial shelf space in bookshops given over to biographies and autobiographies of famous – or undeservedly obscure – racers, histories of classic races, memoirs of passionate fandom, anthologies of sports journalism, tourist guides to cycling the routes of races, lavish collections of photojournalism and glossy, fetishistic photographic celebrations of racing bikes, racing jerseys or even promotional memorabilia. Films of bicycle racing are one instance of this rich cycle of recontextualisation and renarration. As Josh Malitsky observes, one consequence of this is that contemporary sport documentaries typically acknowledge that the history of a particular sport is also the history of its mediation, and so ‘contemporary sports documentaries continually assert that knowing about sport requires knowing about and through media’.
In other words, there is a co- constitutive relationship between modern sport and media. This is particularly evident with the Tour de France, which was first staged in 1903 as a promotional stunt to boost newspaper sales:
‘Georges Lefèvre, the cycling editor of L’Auto-Vélo, a sporting daily, hatched the concept…to upstage his paper’s chief rival, Le Vélo. Headed by the tireless promoter Pierre Giffard, Le Vélo was already running two races, Paris–Bourdeaux and Paris–Brest–Paris. As Giffard had discovered, the buildup to and coverage of the races themselves provided an excellent means to sell newspapers. Lefèvre’s boss, Henri Desgranges, agreed to try out the idea of a grand ‘stage race’ that would last several weeks and attract the top racers.’
The form of the ‘Tour’ is shaped by the commercial demands of publishers, offering readers an extended narrative of daily updates covering the subplots of passing rivalries, intrigues and conspiracies, minor contests and diverse environments, from pancake- flat sprint stages and time trials to lofty ‘queen stages’. As Paul Fournel has commented, ‘in bicycle racing…the day-to-day narrative of a race is very good for a reader, is always very easy to digest’. However, the promotional value of cycle racing extends well beyond news titles. Indeed, one reporter observed that ‘every labourer in France…remembers the name of the winning make when he has to buy a new bicycle’.
However, if it was good for a reader of daily newspapers, it is even better for a film or television viewer, who can watch in it real time. The media– sport interrelation was also crucial to the emergence of cinema, since sport provided early film- makers in different countries with both subject matter and a pre-constituted audience. As film historian Luke McKernan observes, Eadweard Muybridge’s experiments with moving pictures initially ‘came into being through a problem of chief interest to the horse racing community’. However, McKernan continues by challenging the technological determinism of film historians, who understand cinema as the product of a series of technical experiments, and proposes that ‘one may even go as far as to say that the mere mechanical construction of a film projector has been overestimated, and that it was boxing that created cinema.’ McKernan is drawing a distinction here between a restricted concept of cinema, as the technical apparatus of film-making, and a broader concept of cinema, as a component of modern culture and society. This argument is based on the prominence of sport, gymnastics and dance in early American films, and the particular popularity of boxing films, which led to the first feature film, directed by Enoch J. Rector in 1897 (in a 63 mm widescreen format), a two- hour record of the heavyweight world championship fight between Jim Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons. Boxing is eminently filmable, since the action takes place within fixed boundaries, and McKernan suggests that the boxing film is the stylistic and thematic source of American film: ‘In the early American boxing film we can see the very birth of American cinema – realism and drama, newsfilm and fakery, commercialism, populism, professionalism, two protagonists battling within the perfect staging, the ring.’
The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (Rector, 1897)
Films about cycle racing thus belong to a history of sport films as old as the medium itself. While boxing was especially significant in American cinema, ‘[o]ther sports filmed to some degree or other in Britain by 1900 were golf, cycling, polo, cycle polo, water polo, wrestling, gymnastics, and of course the perennial favourite, the Oxford and Cambridge boat race’. Prolific Lancashire film-makers Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon produced many films featuring cycling, athletics, rowing, rugby and football, for example, in documenting Edwardian life in Britain and Ireland. A 1901 film of the amateur Manchester Muratti Cup race, the ten- mile ‘Race of Champions’, shows the riders setting off chaotically from the start line on the Fallowfield velodrome; shots showing the spectators pressed into the terraces alongside the track, and the winner, Roland Jansen, being carried aloft on the shoulders of the crowd, who are capering in front of the camera (both in excitement at the result and at the novelty of being filmed), give a good sense of the popularity of the sport.
Race for the Muratti Cup (Mitchell and Kenyon, 1901)
Revolutionary Films: Cycling and Cinema 