Get the stories behind the game: Eight winning sports documentaries from CBC Docs
As much as we love to say sports builds character, sports reveals character
Can't enough of the Olympics and need more sports? CBC Docs has a whole array of quality sports documentaries. Get the stories behind the games. Find out what drives the athletes you love, and why sports are so important to us.
Sports on Fire
This six-part series digs deep into moments where some of the world's greatest athletes are caught up in monumental events that change the course of history.
Told from the point of view of elite athletes and historians through interviews and archival footage, each episode takes a behind-the-scenes look at stories like Jesse Owens' medal wins at the 1936 Berlin Olympics; Barry Bonds' involvement in baseball's steroids scandal and the 1972 Canada-U.S.S.R. Summit Series that ultimately led to a stunning victory in Moscow.
Inside an Athletes Head
Olympians, NHLers, NBA stars and more talk about the highs and lows that come with being a high-performance athlete in their own words.
"We put these athletes on a pedestal, but then we forget they are humans at the core of it, and they have the same struggles and obstacles and insecurities that we all do,"says filmmaker Michael Hamilton.
Each profile in this series takes you deep inside the lives, and minds, of the people you see on your TV, performing inspiring acts of athletic prowess.
The Stand
"I didn't know what I was going to do, but I had to do something." With a massive global platform that only the Olympic Games can provide, U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, gold and bronze medallists, pointed their black-gloved hands towards the sky to protest the racial inequality that was ripping their country apart in 1968.
Back then, there were serious consequences to their defying gesture. Both were expelled from the Olympic village and sent home where they were vilified and met with death threats.
More than 50 years later, this gesture would come to symbolise an era and inspire every generation since.
After Munich
On September 5th 1972, the tenth day of the Munich Olympics, the Palestinian terrorist group Black September stormed the Israeli athletes' quarters. The world watched live on television as eleven hostages were taken and later killed.
Ankie Spitzer, the widow of the murdered athlete Andre Spitzer, has spent nearly fifty years trying to keep her husband's memory alive, finding solace in her fight for recognition so the world will never forget.
Groomed as Israel's fastest runner, Esther Roth Shahamorov loses her dream and becomes a role model for the next generation, waiting for someone to break her record and pass the torch.
And Sylvia Raphael and Marianne Gladnikoff were part of the Mossad team on a mission to assassinate the Palestinian terrorist responsible.
Four women revisit the Munich Massacre, the moment that changed their lives forever.
The Equalizer
It seems as if athletic world records are broken during every Olympic Games. And while it's true that modern athletes are, on average, better fed, better trained and better prepared than their predecessors, it's also true that they have the benefit of new, high-tech gear that the athletes of yesteryear never could have imagined.
Watch as modern Olympians like Andre DeGrasse and Sarah Hammer are given vintage equipment and challenged to break the records of legends like Jesse Owens and Beryl Burton on an equal playing field.
Run As One: The Journey of the Front Runners
In 1967, a group of young First Nations runners brought the Pan-American Games torch 800km, from Minneapolis to Winnipeg, only to have the torch taken from them and given to a white athlete at the last minute. Fifty years later, they gathered to talk about the experience.
Maiden
In 1989, 26-year-old Tracy Edwards raced around the world in a sailboat with the first ever all-female crew. "How many times I was told we couldn't do it. You're not strong enough. You're not skilled enough. You'll all die."
Against the odds, and beating male crews in their class, the Maiden and her crew changed the open-ocean yacht racing world forever.
Dima's Game
When refugee Dima fled her home in Syria, she had to leave everything behind, except her love of competition. Now, she's building a new life in Canada, and building towards a new goal: being a Paralympian champion in table tennis.
