Page 211 - Sport Culture and the Media

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this matter: he likes sport and film but not together, because ‘Sports are now.
Movies are then. Sports are news. Movies are fables’. It might also be the case
that a prominent place for sport in fiction film will deter non-sports fans at the
box office. Thus, sport on film, unless it is to be very carefully targeted to
relatively small, specialized audiences, needs to be tailored to the needs of
sports and non-sports fans alike by doing justice to the sporting elements of the
film for the former and expanding its concerns to the satisfaction of the latter.
To be a broad audience pleaser (and not ‘box office poison’), the issues con-
fronted in the fictional sports film must simultaneously illuminate the sporting
world, the other worlds with which it comes into contact, and the relations
(actual and metaphorical) between them. For this reason, fictional sports films
tend to be allegorical (Rowe 1998), framed as grand moral tales in which sport
is represented as a metaphor for life and, not uncommonly, life is represented as
a metaphor for sport. To demonstrate this point, it is instructive to examine
some well-known sports films and to tease out the themes that link sports
mythologies to the concerns of everyday life.
One of the definitive sports films of the early 1980s (not least because of its
sweeping, stirring electronic soundtrack by Vangelis) was the British film
Chariots of Fire. Released in the early years of the Thatcher government, it was
a popular choice for exhibition at fund-raising events for the Conservative
Party, who had their own ‘prototype’ champion elite athlete seemingly drawn
from the frames of the film – Sebastian Coe (later to become a Conservative
Member of Parliament). Chariots of Fire is a quintessential sports film (in this
case based on real historical events and characters) in that it deals squarely with
the mythological possibilities of transcendence of class, ethnic prejudice and
human selfishness through sport. The main featured runner, Harold Abrahams
(played by Ben Cross), has to overcome the snobbishness and anti-Semitism
of the masters of his Cambridge college; deal with the problem of being at
the same time teammate and competitor with other athletes, including one
drawn from the same aristocratic class that has ridiculed him; compensate for
his own lack of material resources, and so on. In the most famous scene from
the film, he is shown on a training run on the beach, the rhythmic pulse of
the soundtrack (overlaid with a grandiose melody) matching the pace of the
runner striving against the odds for sporting victory. This scene contrasts with
another of a training run in the private grounds of a stately home involving an
aristocratic athlete jumping hurdles on which are placed glasses of champagne.
The ‘feel good’ quality of his final success, the patriotic fervour induced by
international sporting competition, and the nostalgic atmosphere of a film
(including an evocation of the Olympianism of antiquity, as the title indicates)
set in a time before big business had penetrated to the core of high-performance
sport, made the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire appeal to sports fans and to