Wout Van Aert celebrates during stage four of the Tour de France 2022 An empty chair in a dark room. A bearded man with a distinctly European flavour walks in and sits down, stares directly into the camera and introduces himself. He explains why this race is the biggest and the best, why it means everything, why the stakes are so high he might be shot or beheaded or at the very least sacked if he loses.
It cuts to his home in a beautiful rural location where his beautiful family are sitting around a beautiful old table having dinner, and they discuss the peril of his job. Then it cuts to the race, and his voice is describing the teammate he doesn’t really like, and on screen that teammate is beating him, or double-crossing him, or just looking a bit shifty.
Stop me if you’ve seen this one before. Netflix is back with another behind-the-scenes sport docuseries, following in the footsteps of Break Point , Full Swing and Drive to Survive . The producer James Gay-Rees was behind the brilliant movie documentaries Amy , Maradona and Oasis: Supersonic before focusing on sports series with colleague Paul Martin, and they have struck gold with a format that manages to reel in both the discerning sports fan and the curious passer-by.
So perhaps it is no surprise that watching Tour de France : Unchained feels an awful lot like an episode of, say, Drive to Survive . Then again, while it may all […]
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