No pain, no gain for the real McCoy
Being AP Verdict: Winning film about a winner ★★★★✩
Mr Calzaghe Verdict: Decent boxing documentary ★★★✩✩
ANTHONY WONKE’S recent documentary about Cristiano Ronaldo was surprisingly tedious, largely because the footballing superstar is intrinsically a rather dull fellow. But in Being AP, Wonke has a much more promising subject, and makes the most of it.
AP McCoy, 19 times champion jump jockey before his retirement this year, is a genuine phenomenon in a way that Ronaldo, while gloriously gifted, is not.
Wonke’s intimate portrait (how refreshing that he resisted The Real McCoy as a title) shows the sacrifices the Northern Irishman had to make in the course of riding an astonishing 4,000-plus winners, and the demands his recordobliterating career made not just on himself and his body, but also on his wife, Chanelle.
She, indeed, is one of the most eloquent contributors to this absorbing film, explaining that he was driven not just by desire, but also, more viscerally, by fear.
It was the fear of not being champion that kept propelling him through the pain barrier, in a way that his wife describes as ‘bizarre’. He was all too aware, she says, that ‘pain is temporary; losing is permanent’.
Another singular sportsman is the subject of Vaughan Sivell’s film Mr Calzaghe. Welsh boxer Joe Calzaghe had been a multiple world champion and was unbeaten in 46 fights when he retired in 2009.
This unexceptional but modestly enjoyable documentary shows how he did it.