Original title: Sport : le revers de la médaille

English title: The Harder they Fall
90 minutes, Arte France, 2014.

Codirected by Xavier Deleu and Yonathan Kellerman. Coproduced by Arte France, Yuzu Productions, Découpages

 

Story: A multibillion-dollar industry fed by television rights, sportswear sales, fashion subcultures, and video games: today’s athletes are the icons of an expanding economic force. A force fuelled by a well-oiled grinding machine, where athletes are constantly being pushed to unfathomable limits. Today’s sportsmen and women must deliver more goals, faster times, harder hits, sharper tackles… and play longer seasons and added tournaments while heeding to the public’s insatiable lust for greater performances. And they are having an increasingly hard time keeping up with it all. When cyclists feel obliged to dope, when hockey players start committing suicide, and when football players lose their minds to dementia, there comes a time to ask ourselves: has professional sport gone too far?

 

Cast: Serge Betsen, Marion Bartoli, Colin Jackson, Christine Arron, Laurent Brochard, Jean-Pierre Papin, Gennaro Gattuso, Kyle Turley, Jutta Gottschalk-Groll, Corina Gottschalk, Maurizio Vasino, Gianluca De Ponti, Giovanni Ziviani, Aya Cissoko, Antonio Rossi, Brad Hopkins, Perdita Felicien, Chantal Petitclerc, Ines Geipel, Christian Schenk, Henning Fritz, Derek Redmond, Harry Carson, Andreas Krieger,

and Christiane Ayotte, Perikles Simon, Dario D’Ottavio, Massimiliano Castellani, Jean-François Bourg, Claire Carrier, Lili-Naz Hazrati.