[tps_header]Last week we brought you five of the best sports documentaries on the net to help you pass the day. Hopefully you've managed to get through all five at this stage, because the time has come for this week's dose of the best in sports documentaries featuring Wimbledon, the Tour de France and some wheelchair rugby. [/tps_header]
The Irish wheelchair rugby team won the Triple Crown this week in the inaugural Wheelchair Rugby 7s Six Nations. Wheelchair rugby is a completely different version of the game and is known (not without reason) as murderball. Murderball the documentary follows Team USA's journey to the Paralympic Games in Athens in 2004. Steering clear of gratuitous sentimentality, the film allows the athletes' story to stand for itself. And it makes for compulsive viewing.
Andy Murray will carry a nation's hopes on his shoulders once again for the next fortnight when he attempts to finally claim that elusive Wimbledon crown. Andy Murray: The Man Behind the Racquet, aired by the BBC last week, is a comprehensive look at the Scot's career to date, from his extraordinary drive as a child, to hearing his recollections of the Dunblaine massacre to his claiming of a Major at Flushing Meadows for the first time last year. The documentary includes interviews with everyone in the Wimbledon hopeful's life, from his mother to his 'friend', Kevin Spacey and is well worth watching. Although the man himself skipped it, preferring to watch Mock the Week instead.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN416vgWaG0
Sport has become a metaphor for war in the modern era. Nowhere is this more apparent in Western Europe than in Glasgow, where the age old sectarian conflicts that have ravaged these two islands for centuries, have been transposed onto the football field. Vice, makers of some excellent documnetaries, travelled to Scotland last year as Rangers in their previous guise were being wound up to investigate what would happen to those fans who are a huge part of the rivalry once Rangers effectively took an extended hiatus from the game. It includes a number of revealing interviews, including one with Abdul Rafiq; a Rangers fan banned from entering any football stadium for the next five years for singing sectarian chants. He also happens to be the only Muslim member of the English Defence League. Football's Most Dangerous Rivalry tells us a great deal about the fan culture that exists in Britain in IReland that often goes unreported.
You really don't have to be a Formula 1 aficionado to appreciate Senna. Asif Kapadia's film is beautifully shot and is more a live drama than a retrospective documentary. The film is a brilliantly rounded portrait of an often contradictory and complex character. Much has been written and said about this film, but you really need to do what the film does; just watch it and let the subject stand for itself.
The first Tour de France since Lance Armstrong's extraordinary semi-confession to Oprah Winfrey promises to be a good one and will be a fitting one hundreth edition of the sport's greatest race. The seven times winner's shadow still hangs over the sport though and the 2001 documentary Road To Paris reveals much about the most fascinating man in 21st century sport. With the benefit of hindsight, the documentary unwittingly displays a different side to Armstrong than originally intended, although perhaps what is most revealing about the film is the long build-up riders have to the year's main event.
