Personal Best.
Photo: Warner Bros.
This article originally ran on February 14, 2018. We’re republishing it now in honor of the 2024 Summer Olympics.
As the Olympics are to ordinary sporting events, so too is the Olympics sports movie to the run-of-the-mill sports drama. Sure, they’re both basically the same thing — a celebration of pageantry, a feast of human drama — but when you’re talking about the Olympics, the stakes are always elevated. For one thing, they only take place once every four years. For another, unlike our so-called World Series, they actually bring together the entire planet in a global competition to determine who’s really the best in every sport. Even in our fractured, distracted modern times,…
