Review No.162: Personal Best

It's those damned Olympics again. Round two of athletics-based movies sees me take on a more up-to-date story this time of four athletes, most from underprivileged  backgrounds, as they prepare for Olympic tryouts. The documentary starts off in 2007 when director Sam Blair made a short film entitled Sprinters as part of his Film Studies MA and this followed the exploits of Jeanette Kwaykye and James Ellington two youngsters who love to run. We see both of them training hard with Michael Afilaka a tough coach who gives a hard time to Jeanette however their relationship improves as the film goes on where we follow them right up to 2011 and the qualifiers to become part of the Team GB quota.. James' motivation is that he doesn't want to be normal and that all he's wanted to is run claiming that if he doesn't qualify then he'll have to go back to being Job Centre James and bumming around though both of his parents claim that he's extremely motivated. James is probably best known for being the athlete who put himself up on ebay in order to gain a sponsorship deal however the majority of the film is set before this incident which is simply mentioned in the final reel. Jeanette meanwhile is a fairly self-deprecating character who knows that when Sam first started to film her she wasn't a contender at all however now that her relationship with Richard has greatly improved, she seems him almost as a father figure, she knows that she can go the distance despite some injuries holding her back from  qualifying for Beijing. In making this into a feature film Blair has also drafted in two new subjects firstly sprint hurdler Richard Alleyne someone who had been out of the game due to injury and whose coach fears that he's starting from a negative space however, somewhat predictably, he turns himself around in order to be in shape for the World Championships. My favourite of the four subjects is the youngest of the bunch Omardo Anson a 17 year old who only wanted to run rather than doing anything else with his life while his brilliant mother bemoans this fact however knows that he is becoming a man. It's just a shame then that both Richard and Omardo often get pushed to the side in favour of Jeanette and James presumably as Blair has a better relationship with both of them.

For me the problem with Personal Best was that there was so much going on that it was hard to keep up and at times I forgot who of the four I was watching and what they were currently trying to qualify for. The slow motion running scenes were all shot well however after a time they started to become fairly monotonous although those featuring Jeanette displayed a lot more of her character than some of her to-camera interviews did. Admittedly I'm not a huge sports fan so that may be a factor on why I didn't enjoy this as much but I think the fact was that there was no real conclusion due to this finishing before we found out who had actually qualified for the games. It was actually fairly odd as the day I watched was the same day that James failed to get any further in his heats at the Olympics while after a quick search on Google I discovered that none of the other three made it to London 2012. I also started to get fairly annoyed with the electro beats of Lukid which accompanied the majority of the training and sprinting scenes this was because I felt that they lacked emotion as did lot of the film. Though I did like individual elements of the film overall I didn't really connect with any of the four subjects, even though I did love Omardo's mum, while all I learnt about being an athlete was that it was quite hard as you had to sacrifice a lot. Though it's probably on the same level as The Athlete I found that Personal Best wasn't anywhere near as well-made or fascinating as Town of Runners another film about the sacrifices made in order to be an athlete only set in a deprived country. Overall the cinematography and the subjects of Personal Best were interesting up to a point but there really wasn't anything for me to connect with in Blair's film also he faces a lot of competition in the running documentary genre but unfortunately I don't feel he's made it past the first heat.

Verdict: Some good points are covered in Blair's film however after a while I failed to connect with any of the subjects and found the music monotonous so for those reasons Personal Best receives 5.5/10