Cycling: Still the Greatest
1980 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Gary Toole
Genres: documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative
Elite cyclists train and compete in highlights from the 1976 Olympics and 1978 Commonwealth Games, celebrating the speed and thrill of the sport.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 27-minute valentine to competitive cycling shot in 1980—this is exactly the kind of sincere, unflinching sports doc that everyone else sleeps on because it's not ironic enough or weird enough. But there's something weirdly radical about refusing to deconstruct the beauty of athletic pursuit, and that refusal might be the most subversive move of all.
Toole's film sits comfortably within the lineage of the institutional sports documentary—the kind the NFB perfected—yet the contemplative register and the specific decision to linger on physiology and effort rather than drama feels like a considered argument about what cinema owes to athletic form itself.
The choice to foreground the cyclists' breathing and the mechanical pulse of the bike over dramatic narrative arc—letting the sound design carry the meditation—transforms what could've been straightforward highlight reel into something quietly revelatory about endurance and presence.