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Showing posts with label cycling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cycling. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
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Professional cycling is an ego incubator. Out there, alone for hours on the road, the cyclist's thoughts turn inward. The pain they feel in climbing a hill is cross to bear, their speed entirely their own, every triumph borne solely by them. No wonder they turn into pricks. This documentary explores the life and untimely death of Marco Pantani, a hugely popular and vaguely eccentric professional cyclist feted for winning both the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France, a feat still unequalled in the sport. He became known as 'The Pirate', becoming a folk hero in Italy. He was on top of the (cycling) world.
Then six years later his cocaine-stuffed corpse was dragged out of a cheap hotel room. From the heights of athletic achievement to drug-fuelled depravity - what the hell happened? Pantani: The Accidental Death of Cyclist tries to go some way to answer this question, linking athletic excellence with addiction, the sweaty cyclist conquering a mountain in the noonday sun a metaphor for deepr internal struggles.
Pantani's story is shown through a combination of stock footage and dramatic re-enactments. By and large it's a pretty seamless combination, the lookalike they've cast as Pantani does a decent of job of standing in where cameras couldn't go. Though technically this is all decent enough, the childhood sequences have more than a whiff of a Dolmio ad, with a smiling Italian grandfather buying a young Pantani his first bicycle under a picturesque Mediterranean sunset.
As he begins to get a reputation as something special on a bicycle, particularly when it comes to climbing hills. This quickly snowballs into a promising career, and soon he's a professional racer - picking up accolade after accolade. Disaster strikes midway through his career when a forgetful cop overlooks a road closure - and while zooming down a mountain he smashes headlong into an oncoming car. Doctors don't know if he'll even walk again - let alone cycle, but after a long period of recuperation he miraculously gets back on his bike and goes on to win big. Textbook triumph over adversity stuff. But this is cycling in the 90s, that's doping territory. After failing a blood test he's disqualified and shamed, sending him spiralling into depression and drugs.
Hang on a minute... A champion cyclist triumphing over medical adversity followed by a doping disgrace? This is awfully familiar stuff... It's impossible not to think of Lance Armstrong watching this, and particular of Alex Gibney's recent The Armstrong Lie, a documentary that covers the same territory beat for beat. I didn't really enjoy The Armstrong Lie, but Pantani definitely suffers from being released in close proximity. This is more cinematic bad luck than anything particularly wrong with the movie, but if you've seen one explanation of what a peloton is, or how performance enhancing drugs work, sitting through it again is a bit tedious.
There are high points within the film. EPO, the drug that caused all this ruckus ups the red blood cell count, allowing more oxygen to be transported to muscles. Having so many red blood cells means that the cyclist's blood runs the risk of "silting up" if their heartrate falls below a certain level, i.e. when sleeping. To counteract this, doping cyclists had to sleep with heartrate monitors on that'd wake them up if they were in danger, after which they'd hop on exercise bikes built into their bedroom and start to pedalling away so as not to die. There's something poetically kinda neat about these quasi-vampiric nocturnal cyclists who've chemically screwed up their bodies up to such a degree that they need to cycle... or die!
But these interesting nuggets of information are few and far between, and as we close in on the fall from grace the documentary shoots for a rather far-fetched defence of Pantani. Essentially they infer that Pantani wasn't really doping, rather he was just too good a cyclist. It's just not interesting to see the same man winning every race, and so the top bods secretly plotted his downfall by faking the results of his blood tests and kicking him out of the sport. This is paranoid conspiracy theory, and from my (admittedly armchair) perspective, if every other damn cyclist was shooting EPO into their bloodstream then in all likelihood Pantani was too.
There's also a suspiciously quick glossing over of his post-racing life, the audience only learning that he was difficult to be around. Aside from people praising his athletic prowess there's a suspicious lack of people who appreciated him as a person. Professional cyclists tend to be arseholes even when sober, so I can only imagine the horror of a miserable coked up self-hating one. As such, the documentary ultimately feels a little like a PR exercise in image rehabilitation; smoothing off the rougher edges, downplaying the scandal and accentuating his victories - turning disgrace into tragedy.
What's left is a portrait of a man who was undoubtedly a very good cyclist, but doesn't appear to have that much more to him. The attempts to define him as a flamboyant man in a buttoned-down sport never quite come off, the lack of any critique of his doping feels a bit cowardly and the conspiracy theory theorising is just far-fetched. Even The Armstrong Lie, though largely dull, had the frisson of Armstrong publicly flagellating himself for the camera.
I suspect these cycling documentaries are tailor-made for those already into the sport, because they offer precious little to those that don't give a toss about bicycle racing. In my book the gold-standard for the sports doc is Senna, which managed to draw me into a discipline and personality I knew next to nothing about. But the difference is that Ayrton Senna was an interesting, charismatic kind of guy and professional cyclists are by design self-obsessed loners. Who wants to spend 90 minutes exploring their inner life? Not me that's for damn sure.
★★
Pantani: The Accidental Death of a Cyclist is on limited release from May 13th.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
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So a guy cheats in a few bike races, what's the big deal? I can't help but feel like there's some crucial part of the Lance Armstrong story that I'm overlooking, but after watching this documentary it seems like the very definition of a storm in a teacup. Perhaps this is merely a matter of perspective; firstly I don't care about competitive bicycle racing and secondly you need only pick up a newspaper to read about people getting away with completely screwing over the world - crimes which make the misadventures of a disobedient cyclist pale into insignificance.
Obviously I'd heard of Lance Armstrong, but aside from him being a drugged off cyclist I was pretty much in the dark. This feels like one of those times where I've missed the popular culture boat; everyone and their mother appears to have some kind of opinion on Lance Armstrong, usually that he's pretty much Dick Dastardly on a bike. Anyway, he won the Tour De France a bunch of times (a bike race repeatedly and breathlessly described as "the most grueling athletic event in the world"), retired and then had a big comeback in 2009. It's this comeback that the documentary focuses on, showing us a slightly wrinklier Armstrong who's not as good as cycling as he once was, desperate to show everyone that he's still the best around.
This all fell apart when it turned out the reason he was such a good cyclist is because he was stuffing himself with drugs that make you into a good cyclist. After publicly debasing himself for Oprah he was stripped of his athletic achievements, became a sports pariah and was roundly mocked, leaving only his hundreds of millions of dollars and vast mansions to get him through the night.
This documentary is a bit of an odd duck, most of was made in 2009 prior to Armstrong's disgrace. The project was put on hold following the controversy, but director Alex Gibney obviously paid attention when he was told "if life hands you lemons, make lemonade", and readjusted the focus of his film to being a history of doping in cycling, concentrating on the methods Lance Armstrong and others used during his cycling career.
I was expecting these illicit drugs to be along the lines of horse steroids with freaky side effects, so it's a little disappointing to learn that the primary doping agent, EPO, does little more than increase red blood cell count to facilitate oxygen transfer. Even the cyclists themselves appear pretty blase about it, explaining that rather than transform you into a superhero it just makes you tired a little later than usual. Slightly more interesting are the tales of mid-race blood transfusions. The idea is that you train at high altitudes, causing your body to react the lower oxygen content and natural up your red blood cell count. Then you siphon off this blood and transfuse it back in during a low altitude race, giving you a bit of extra pep. This is nicely ghoulish, the idea of people surreptitiously carting around chilled blood to pop back into the riders is like something out of a vampire movie.
None of this is unique to Lance Armstrong though, and we quickly realise that damn near everyone involved in cycling was at it, with the governing bodies tacitly overlooking and advising cyclists when they're in danger of being caught. The film does a bit of moralistic hectoring on why it's wrong to break the rules even if everyone else is doing it, but it's difficult not to see the cyclist's point of view.
But though you can sort of understand why they felt no guilt about getting doped up, it's next to impossible to actually sympathise with the cyclists. The entire sport is jampacked with complete arseholes with egos the size of a planet, the personality traits that make a top quality cyclist neatly aligning with those of a pushy prat. Watch these grown men bitching about each other like a bunch of jealous schoolgirls feels utterly surreal: otherwise apparently intelligent people entirely emotionally consumed by cycling - cycling - for god's sake.
Perhaps the reason I'm so dismissive about all this is that I don't give two shits about competitive sport. Even so I do usually enjoy sports films, I loved Rush and Senna, both of which manage to elevate racing around in cars to zen mastery. Even within the narrow genre of bicycle racing films I adore Breaking Away, a film that makes you want to hop on a bike right away and get sweaty. The best sports movies and documentaries use sport as a jumping off point to examine wider themes of passion and drive. The Armstrong Lie sort of does that, but the baked in layer of paternalist moralising spoils even the simple joy of admiring Armstrong as a successful bastard, yet alone allowing me to enjoy cycling, an activity the film paints as mechanical, miserable and resolutely un-fun.
The Armstrong Lie does explore wider questions: how eager we are to impose fairytale narratives on celebrities, then reacting with disbelief and anger when reality fails to conform to the fiction we've devised. Lance Armstrong became one of these heroes, happily adopting this narrative and allowing everyone (even himself) to believe in the big lie. This total deception of public and self is fertile dramatic soil, Armstrong having the potential to be a tragic figure in a classically dramatic sense.
Undermining all that is that Armstrong, though embodying the tragic hero, was a goddamn cyclist; an essentially meaningless profession that only a moron would truly care about. And boy do we see hundreds of these morons. The race spectators are a blur of pissed-up sunburnt flesh, an army of goobering boobs with flags painted on their beer bellies jumping in and out of the path of the cyclists, whooping away their last few brain cells as the clearly annoyed riders shoo them out of the way. These are the people that bought into the Lance Armstrong fiction and to look at them you can't help but think they were in sore need of a dose of cold reality. The moral of the story? If your definition of a hero is someone being able to ride a bike pretty well then you deserve everything you get.
The Armstrong Lie is, at minimum, an interesting window into the murky world of professional cycling. But crucially it never gets under Lance Armstrong's skin, settling for sternly waggling a finger in his direction and making sure we all know that he's a very naughty boy.
★★
The Armstrong Lie is on general release from January 31st.
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