“The Sporting Image” is the summer 2024 edition of the Notebook Insert, a seasonal supplement on moving-image culture.
Multiplex asks filmmakers, critics, and artists for short-form responses to the topic at hand. In this issue, contributors consider how athletic contests are portrayed on screen.
Illustration by Ivy Johnson.
SAVANAH LEAF on volleyball
Filmmaker; director, Earth Mama (2023); former volleyball player for Great Britain, 2012 London Olympics
Savanah Leaf prepares to serve to the Algerian national team in the first round of the 2012 London Olympics.
It’s hard for me to remember what it was like to be filmed as an athlete. The London Olympics were twelve years ago, and I honestly never really thought about the cameras. The audience was always kind of a blur, and I was in some form of a “flow state” so my mind felt detached. Now, the footage of the games is almost the only thing I have to remember. My highlights are my memories.
There’s something beautifully honest about a “highlight.” Sometimes I watch them to see who I was back then. A young athlete in peak physical shape, exerting every ounce of energy in my body. I had this youthful confidence back then; sometimes I wish I had it now. I always knew, in my head, that I was better than my opponent. I was composed for the most part, but then there were moments where extreme emotions would slip through: I would grunt with exhaustion, scream over a bad referee call, shout with joy over an epic game winner, and cry over a lost match. I was unaware of the camera, yet somehow the camera was always placed to get the close-up.
As a director, I try to create an environment where myself and the actors can be in the “flow state” while filming. I try to do all the preparation ahead and place the cameras in unobstructive places so that, when we are on set, we can follow our instincts as the scene unfolds. The goal is to become so wrapped up in the moment that the actors forget they are being watched. Then in the edit I find the highlights, and leave the bad takes on the cutting-room floor. After all, the highlights are the ones that we will always remember.
SERGIO DE LA PAVA on boxing
Novelist; author, Every Arc Bends Its Radian (2024)
“Steel,” The Twilight Zone (Don Weis, 1963).
Every two years, at least, I get the uneasy sensation that I am being most powerfully struck by the wrong element. Struck while everyone else minds the fundamentals and keeps their eye on the ball. I think of imagination during the Olympics because for me it is that element, not endurance, skill, or determination, that suffuses its two weeks.
Every sport is testamentary when it comes to ingenuity and creative invention. Think of the impassioned fan. Before she could even contemplate becoming one with a larger organism whose principal purpose is lamenting officiating incompetence and the caprices of immutable physics, someone(s) had to literally and figuratively draw the lines. Lines that reacted to observable physics and birthed the sport out of nothing. Out of chaos, order. And out of that novel order, humans endlessly conforming and honing the applicable physical movements.
None of this applies to boxing. This is the case mainly because, as others have observed, boxing is not really a sport. It gets called a sport, sure, but that kind of mislabeling is the fate of everything sui generis. Here, lines created nothing and no one had to learn anything unnatural in response to them. Boxing is not the name of any invention; it is an agreement to harness one of humanity’s most noxious instincts in such a way that beauty will occasionally emerge.
Olympic boxing is still a thing, though its televisual prominence has certainly dwindled in the last half-century. An odd turn given how electric it all plays on the screen. If there truly exist entities that are unfilmable, boxing is something like the opposite: film it and only the wholly incapable fail to profit. Boxing works cinematically because the truth works and boxing is true. The rest is games.
CARSON LUND on the Home Run Derby
Filmmaker; director, Eephus (2024)
Teoscar Hernández competes in the first round of the 2024 Major League Baseball Home Run Derby.
I’d venture to guess that most casual sports fans have not seen the NHL’s midwinter stick-handling competition or the passing round of the NBA Skills Challenge, but they have sat down at some point in their lives to watch strong guys jack baseballs out of stadiums upward of ten times a minute at the annual MLB Home Run Derby. It’s a winning entertainment formula (certainly more so than the snooze-worthy Summer Classic), and yet the event mutates every year: new rules, new competitive format, and especially new camera angles. This year, ESPN implemented a Matrix-style 270-degree circular camera rig behind home plate and an alternate “Statcast Edition” telecast complete with 3D spray charts and multi-camera split-screens.
All the added fanfare is cool for sickos like me, but I’d argue that a degree of visual familiarity—not novelty—is key to appreciating the simple force and grace of a home run. Ultimately, it is the unreconstructed broadcast angle—the telephoto lens perched in center field placing the pitcher on the left of frame and the batter on the right—that provides the purest vicarious pleasure. Which is why credit must go to director Doug Holmes for landing, in the 2024 broadcast, on an angle that rivals the old standby, or more accurately, completes it: the rear corner view, a wide-angle shot from behind the batter pointed toward the pull-side grandstands. When this shot is added to a split-screen alongside the familiar behind-the-pitcher angle and aided by motion-tracked flight tracing, the viewer gets a comprehensive, real-time visual record of the path of the baseball, and the Bazinian trumps the Eisensteinian. To paraphrase Rednex, we see where it comes from and where it goes.
REBECCA LIU on the post-game interview
Critic and writer, The Guardian and Another Gaze
Every day, seemingly at every hour, a spectacular game of banality is staged on television screens across the world. Here is an athlete, face glinting with sweat, either flush with triumph or weary with defeat; there is a decidedly less sweaty interviewer, microphone in hand. The two are physically close, yes, but their intentions couldn’t be further apart. The journalist hopes to get a juicy, revealing quote, the kind that might spark news stories. And the player? Go, girl, give us nothing.
The hilarious anti-theater of the post-match interview easily inspires parodies. In Key and Peele’s “Ozamataz Buckshank’s Post-Game Interview,” Keegan-Michael Key is the sharp-suited broadcaster to Jordan Peele’s brusque American football star. The correspondent asks Buckshank to walk us through the game.
“Yeah we had to go out there, give 100 percent, we executed.”
Key asks more questions: about today’s game, about last week’s defeat, about Buckshank’s new baby twins. Ozamataz Buckshank will not be swayed. Execute. Give 100 percent.
The interview becomes increasingly absurd, with a now-frothing Key pleading for “one actual, original observation about today’s game—the game that you won almost single-handedly!” But in the real world, reporters can do no such thing. And so we spectators watch on, splayed on our sofas, drawn ceaselessly into this contentless content, where all that is left is pure form (and usually a wall of ads placed conspicuously in the background); hoping, begging, for something, anything.
CASSIE DA COSTA on long-distance running
Writer
The leaders of the women's marathon at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics approach the two-hour mark.
The Olympic Games rely on earnest—and naïve—viewership. To spend days in front of the screen, watching patchy, tacky, over-commentated footage, you have to believe the athletes you’re rooting for are good, deserving sports heroes who aren’t doping. But watching can be like loving: despite what you do and don’t know, the ride is worth it.
Still, it can be difficult to connect through a screen. Broadcasters treat distance running events as niche. If you’re the odd—and I mean odd—person who loves the sport, you’ll be used to the disrespect. Live coverage cuts away to inane commercials and other events throughout, even in a race as short as the 800 meters: a little less than half a mile, covered by pros in under two minutes. Naturally, Olympic marathons, which the top women will run in under two and a half hours, are plagued by these interruptions.
Camera angles also fail these runners. The best views are at the athlete’s level, as if we’re riding a sidecar hitched to them. Seeing the crowd fly past them, we get a sense of the competitors’ scorching paces. Usually, however, we get a head-on or drop-in view—it looks as if they’re jogging. Naturally, the uninitiated get bored. That might explain the dearth of good films about distance running. To really love the sport, and love watching it, you need to be comfortable with silence and repetition. The tedium of life is unavoidable, the end uncomfortably in sight.
SANOJA BHAUMIK on tennis
Writer
Aryna Sabalenka serves to Ons Jabeur in the 2023 Wimbledon semifinal.
Televised tennis is fixated on the static overhead view. For most of the match, the camera is positioned above the head of the serving player, presenting the full court onscreen. But this choice also shortens the court; the player’s body and speed become difficult to perceive, and importantly, the viewer can no longer discern the arc of the ball, including the distance by which it clears the net. This arc is the result of topspin: in just milliseconds of contact, the player brushes their racquet strings across the ball, rotating it forward as it crosses the court, imbuing it with both depth and power.
Rafael Nadal is perhaps the most famous heavy-topspin player, hitting the ball at over 3,200 revolutions per minute on average. Daniil Medvedev, his 2022 Australian Open final opponent, imparts almost 1,000 fewer revolutions per minute with his forehand. On television, their differences are rendered largely by their wildly different strokes (Nadal’s whipping lasso versus Medvedev’s flat whack of the ball). But in person, at the court level, the ball’s height allows the spectator to perceive two distinct forms of power—the straight, fast ball that skims over the net, and the spinning ball that quickly drops only to bounce high again.
By distancing the spectator from the player, the overhead view heightens the game’s geometry: an extended rally which moves opponents both vertically and laterally is the epitome of drama. The less-utilized on-court view, in which the camera is positioned at the players’ feet, elevates the game’s physicality, but it also makes it difficult to follow the movements of a long exchange. The overhead view favors players like Ons Jabeur, who defeated Aryna Sabalenka—perhaps the most powerful hitter in the women’s game—in last year’s Wimbledon semifinal. Seen from above, Jabeur’s angled strikes and drop shots toss her opponent across the court. She is inventive and thrilling, especially in comparison to the strong, yet predictable groundstrokes from Sabalenka. Watching the match on television, one notes a trade-off between displays of power and elegance, athleticism and strategy. Even as professional tennis has become increasingly defined by physical strength and fitness, broadcasters have thus far chosen to retain the illusion of the sport as sweatless and stylish—and, at its peak, effortless.