Esquire UK have put together a list of what they think are the greatest sports documentaries of all time. Why have we shared it with you? Because it includes one of our favorite documentaries of all time, featuring one of the best skiers of all time, Shane McConkey.
- Related: GNAR: The Legacy of Shane McConkey
Compiled by a British magazine, soccer features prominently, but other great documentaries such as Free Solo, Touching the Void, Senna, and the most recent Netflix phenomenon The Last Dance round off a wide selection of sports from around the world. A great list, and if where you are is still under lockdown measures, worth working your way through.
- McConkey (2013)
The sub-genre of ski and snowboard films is notable mainly for wild landscapes and outlandish stunts. This film, although sharing a little of that DNA, is an outlier, because it has genuine emotional pull and ranges beyond extreme sport into something far deeper about human endeavor and the search for happiness, wherever you look for it. Shane McConkey was a skier who graduated into base-jumping, and pioneered a combination of the two, skiing off mountains and deploying his parachute at the last second. He was also a husband and a father; reconciling family and work is just one conflict in his unique life. The home video of his younger years draws you immediately close to the subject. McConkey is highly likable, not the high-fiving brah you might have suspected him to be. Thus, the film’s last act is far more poignant than you’d bargained for.
– Esquire
- Free Solo (2018)
- Touching the Void (2003)
- OJ: Made in America (2016)
- The Last Dance (2020)
- Kicking & Screaming (1995)
- No No: A Dockumentary (2014)
- An Impossible Job (1994)
- A Sunday In Hell (1977)
- Tyson (2008)
- The Gambler (2000)
- Freedom’s Fury (2006)
- Hoop Dreams (1994)
- Hillsborough (2016)
- Deep Water (2006)
- When We Were Kings (1996)
- Senna (2010)
- The Two Escobars (2010)
- Premier Passions (1998)
- Dark Horse (2015)
- Undefeated (2011)
- Tokyo Olympiad (1965)
