It was only 35 years ago, and the main players are still only in middle age, but international sport has changed completely since the events described. In the 1980s, the athletes were mere pawns in grand geopolitical games: there were major boycotts of the 1976, 1980 and 1984 Olympics; the Eastern bloc used sports to try to prove their superiority over the West; and South Africa was in the middle of a 30-year ban. All three of these are touched on in The Fall, the story of the women's 3000m at the 1984 Olympics.
Mary Decker, as a white, photogenic woman who consistently beat the Soviets on the track, had been the media's golden girl for over a decade. When the Soviets withdrew, the press wanted another angle, and it fell into their lap when South African wonder runner Zola Budd, who earlier that year had run faster over 3000m than Decker ever had, applied for British citizenship to run at the Olympics.
Budd's own story was complicated. As a teenager in 1984 was naive and unworldly. She only ever wanted to run, but found controversy swirling wherever she went - about her fast-tracked citizenship; about her views on apartheid; and about Mary Decker, whom she knew only from photographs.
In a time before 'personal brand', Facebook and Instagram, what we saw was what the journalists chose to show us. As a result, the athletes' personal lives were a mystery to the public, and nobody knew what was going on behind the myriad headlines - even for America's golden girl.
On its simplest reading, this movie is just the back stories of two runners competing against each other on the world's biggest stage. But those stories touch on so many things - sports psychology, family dynamics, global politics, press influence - that the story transcends the sport or just the one race.
This documentary is worth seeing for anyone who wants to see what actually goes into the making of a world-class athlete.
