Sprint TV review — Netflix warms up for Olympics with dashing docu-series

How do you fill the size-13 shoes of one of the greatest, most charismatic athletes of all time? This is the question that has loomed over every major track-and-field tournament since the record-obliterating Jamaican Usain Bolt hung up his spikes in 2017. 

Despite the emergence of a talented, competitive generation of speed-merchants in recent years — especially in the women’s 100 metres — there is a feeling in the sport that sprinting is running out of steam. Look back at footage from the biggest races of the past half-decade and you will largely see half-empty stadiums.

With the Olympics only weeks away, a new Netflix series seeks to do for running what Drive to Survive did for Formula 1. Filmed during the 2023 season, Sprint takes us trackside, following a crop of elite 100-metre and 200-metre specialists who will be vying for glory in Paris. Among them are the Americans Noah Lyles and Sha’Carri Richardson (two big personalities whose self-aggrandising is backed up by lightning speed), Italian Marcell Jacobs (a surprise champion at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics who has since struggled with injuries) and the Jamaican trio Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Elaine Thompson-Herah and Shericka Jackson.

Soundbites and banalities about destiny, determination and belief dominate many of the interviews. But more intimate fly-on-the-wall scenes that follow the athletes at home, in training and on tour illuminate the individual characters and their interactions with rivals. You realise how much of the race is run before the gun goes off. Lyles in particular appears to relish the mind games; his ostensibly innocuous comments, glances and gestures seem geared towards unnerving the competition. Elsewhere, Jacobs, Jackson and 100- and 200-metre UK record holder Zharnel Hughes talk about the mental toll of a discipline in which every microsecond and misstep is scrutinised.

Perhaps no sport is as much defined by fine margins as sprinting. Yet the series is disappointingly sketchy on the technical details that make all the difference between a sub-9.7-second time and an underwhelming run only fractionally slower. And while clips from key races showcase the exhilarating intensity of sprinting, there is little insight into why these particular athletes are currently the best of the best.

The result is a documentary that seems more like a sport-adjacent reality show or a polished PR campaign (tellingly, there is no mention of the doping issues that have blighted athletics for decades). A punchier, pacier approach might have served its purposes better. With a runtime of more than four hours, Sprint can feel less like a sprint than a marathon. 

★★★☆☆

On Netflix now