8/6/2019 Catch - 2011 Sports Docs

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Catch. A quarterly independent publication. Online Special..2011: The Year of the Sports

DocumentaryThis year is arguably the year of the sports documentary, with the Sundance winning Sennaandthe critically acclaimed Fire in Babylon captivating audiences of a not-so sporting kind. DavidMeller and Ben Murray oer their takes on both lms.SennaThere is a moment in Senna, the Sundance winning doc-umentary on the Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna directedby Asif Kapadia (The Warrior, Cinema16: British ShortFilms), that is easy to miss.

During the closing credits, Senna is shown stopping hiscar, jumping out and running to the aid of French driverrik Comas, who suered an accident during qualifyingfor the 1992 Belgian Grand Prix.

Senna could have continued his lap, yet decided to helphis fellow driver. It summed perfectly up the man and hisbattle to rise above the self-interest and politics thatblighted the sport. As he remarks, Formula 1 is political,it is money.

His tussle with FIA president and egotistical French-man Jean-Marie Balestre, is a potent example. It came toa head in 1989 in Japan, the site where many of Sennaskey career moments took place. On lap 47, Senna andProst came together as Senna looked to take the lead.

Prost retired and promptly got out of car, thinking

Senna would do the same this would have handed Prostthe drivers championship. However, Senna kept his carrunning, went through an escape road and eventually wonthe race and the title.

Prost quickly protested. Senna argued that he couldnot safely turn around and complete the infamous Casiochicane, but his argument failed and he was disqualied.Prost won the title and Balestre ned Senna $100,000 andgave him a suspended six month ban. Senna later accusedBalestre of manipulating the championship in favour ofhis fellow countryman Prost.

Another example arrives through the breathtaking in-car footage of Senna throwing away a 55 second lead overProst in 1988 at Monaco: a potentially remarkable exam-ple of self-interest over the rational, of not sailing to vic-

tory but pushing for more. He wanted to humiliate me,said Prost. That was his weakness.But Kapadia and writer Manish Pandey present a man

who wrestled with his own complexity and spirituality.After the Monaco debacle, Senna commented that he feltcloser to God and had learnt from his mistake. He even-tually won six of his next eight races and the 1988 cham-pionship with one of the most memorable races in thehistory of motor sport. Stalling on the grid in the nal racein Japan, Senna chased down Prost to win in the pouringrain.

To say it was self-interest risks being blinkered: for Ka-padia and Pandey, Sennas career was fuelled by trying toachieve spiritual acceptance. Prost, presented throughoutthe lm as something of a pantomime villain, dismissedSennas spirituality as something that made him a danger

on the racetrack.But Sennas determination to be accepted by support-

ers and his countrymen was just as important, with noth-ing expressing this more than his 1991 victory in Brazil.When crossing the line, Senna is heard screaming and cry-ing, in joy and pain as he suers from muscle spasms, andthe race stewards are seen dancing. He shares his victo-

ries and raises the prole of Brazil, said one Brazilianwoman.

The footage leading up to Sennas death at Imola is dif-cult to watch, with the horric crash of fellow country-man Rubens Barrichello and the death of AustralianRoland Ratzenberger acting as ghoulish precursors forwhat was to come.

But perhaps more harrowing was how Kapadiashowed the anguish and torment on Sennas face, debatingwhether to race or not. In the end, he made the wrongdecision. But was this decision driven by self-interest, pol-itics or a belief in something higher? Was he driven to hisdeath by his faith?

Ayrtons sister, Viviane, said that prior to the raceAyrton read his Bible. The passage said God would givehim the greatest of all gifts. The in-car footage of thefateful lap six of 58 is as unbearable and as tense as anymoment in cinema, leaving you to question whetherSennas inseparable faith in God was warranted.

Senna is a lm so intellectually stimulating that itpushes the bar of the sport documentary: you dont expect

to handle questions about spirituality and religion. Andthe quality of the archive footage, particularly the in-carsequences, is as captivating and dramatic as anything elsein cinema, ctional or otherwise.

This is helped by Kapadias decision not use traditionaltalking heads, instead using simple voiceovers from inter-views with the likes of Viviane and The Guardians chiefsports writer, Richard Williams. Kapadia trusts thearchive footage and lets it do the work. In some sense, itis reminiscent ofZidane: un portrait du 21e sicle: it is thesubject matter that matters, not those talking about it.

All these elements come together to make Senna easilyone if not the best sport documentary since the Oscar-winning When We Were Kings. DMFire in BabylonFire in Babylon, the Stevan Riley directed documentary,presents the story of the fearsome and all conquering1970s and 80s West Indies cricket team: a team that notonly fought for a level playing eld on the pitch, but alsosought to give the Caribbean people a sense of identityand nationhood.

While told through the experiences of players and sup-porters and musicians such as Bunny Livingstone of theWailers, Babylon is far from a rose-tinted nostalgia trip.Battered mentally and physically in 1975-6 by the Aus-tralian fast bowling duo of Dennis Lillee and Je Thom-son, as well as racist spectators, the Windies were at theirlowest ebb: the Calypso Cricket of previous years enter-tained but lacked substance. Yet all this changed through

the shrewd captaincy of the bespeckled Guyanese CliveLloyd.

Babylon cleverly details was the underlying turmoilthat black Caribbean people had to undergo, which wentin some part to explain their cricket teams battle hard-ened psyche. There were riots in politically unstable coun-tries such as Jamaica, newly independent from the ruling

colonies. The post-war mass immigration, juxtaposedwith fresh memories of the American civil rights move-ment, provoked anger and xenophobia from ignorantwhites.

This all came to a head in 1976, when the West Indiestoured England in an era of National Front and the nownotorious ITV sitcom Love Thy Neighbour. Tony Greig,the hardy, tough South African born white captain ofEngland, stated in interview that he intended to makethem grovel.

The Windies needed no other incentive. Fast bowlersMichael Holding and Andy Roberts both of whomwould later be joined by Joel Garner and Colin Croft toform the frightening bowling quartet known as the FourHorsemen of the Apocalypse peppered the ageing Eng-lish team with x-rated short pitched bowling that oftenresulted in a cart-wheeling o-stump in the process.

Meanwhile, the impudent, arrogant stroke-play of thethen young but physically imposing Vivian Richards pep-pered boundary boards across the country. With the fa-ther-gure Lloyd keeping all the egos of his charges in

check, the Windies won the series 3-0 to the delight oftheir beleaguered supporters. In the end, Greig himselfwas forced to grovel.

Interestingly, Wisdens report on the series made nomention of Greigs remark or the politics surrounding thetour: it simply said the Windies side was made up of asplendid bunch of players. No hint of the former coloniesgetting their revenge. Still, eight years later the Windiesonce again gave England a cricketing lesson in their ownback yard with the Black Wash 5-0 Test series win. Todate, it is the only whitewash by a touring Test nation.

Babylon also accurately analyses and assesses the keysto the West Indies success. Their tness regimes, higherstandards of elding and TV exposure given by KerryParkers rebel World Series Cricket (WSC) in the late

1970s (not to mention the extra wages), brought the WestIndies to a new audience through Packers Super Testsagainst the WSC Australian XI and inspired the fearlessbatsmanship of today.

But there was a negative side to this new found wealthand status; an all black rebel West Indies side, largely madeup of disillusioned Windies players not being selected bythe West Indies Cricket Board, naively toured apartheidSouth Africa in the 1980s, with players defying a world-wide boycott in order to gain fees of up to 70,000. Thecricketing authorities also still ran by the white majority,cried foul at what they saw was intimidating, bullying tac-tics by the West Indies and employed new laws to stiethe battery of fast bowling.

Fire in Babylon is a compelling and breathless accountthat represents the power and inuence sport can exude.

But it also presents how far the West Indies have fallen,and continue to fall, since these heady days. Musician Liv-ingstone compared Viv Richards to Bob Marley in termsof sheer independence, self-belief and identity. TheWindies could do with discovering these once again. BM

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