Elite Athletes Documented In New Way In ‘Unseen Olympiad’

For the Paris Olympics last summer, NBC Universal aired an astonishing 7,000 hours of coverage over the 19 days of the games.

Arguably lost in that barrage of coverage, however, was a sense of the athletes’ subjective experience of competition – their inner mental, emotional and physical landscape as they participated in this key moment of their young lives.

The impressionistic documentary Unseen Olympiad captures that missing element of the athletes’ sensory world as they strain to achieve peak performance in summer and winter sports – swimming, track and field, fencing, ski jumping, and more. The film directed by Casey Shaw and produced by Shaw, Kelly Dawkins, and Miles Labat just held its world premiere at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece (the country that, of course, hosted the first Olympic games in 776 BCE).

“When we go to watch these events now there’s music playing almost constantly, like ‘pump up’ music. And when you watch it on TV, it’s broadcasters that are saying, ‘This is who you should look at. This is who’s winning. These are their records and their history,’” sound designer and sound mixer Spencer Poole noted at a Q&A following the world premiere. “But you’re never hearing the sound of the sport like you’re there. So, we wanted to take that approach. We wanted to accent the different bits that make these sports unique, that the athletes are hearing themselves.”

Poole continued, “The sounds of a ski jump, skiing on the ice [track]… is something I’d never heard before. Standing next to it, it sounds like a rocket ship kind of thing. This was shock to me because all I ever have seen at ski jumping is just they go up and then they’re in the air and they come down and that’s it. There’s this thing that these athletes are hearing every single time, every single day that they know really well, and they know the exact timing of how that’s supposed to feel, and we wanted to include that type of effect.”

Unseen Olympiad was shot at the 2023 FISU World University Games – the winter sports competition held in January of that year in Lake Placid, NY, with the summer sports competition taking place in July and August 2023 in Chengdu, Sichuan, China. Shaw took a deliberately analog approach to the production, choosing not just to document the events on 16mm film, but using undeveloped film stock from decades ago to evoke a much earlier era of Olympic sports coverage.

“The biggest reason we chose to shoot on film was because it’s been the archival choice of format for almost all of the historic Olympic films and a good majority of Bud Greenspan’s films, which are arguably the greatest films that have been made by an American about the Olympics,” Shaw told Deadline. “At a time in which it was not common for Americans to highlight other nationalities or other cultures in media, [Greenspan] would go to places where these athletes were and interview them in their native language and really focus on the journey of an athlete rather than their journey as an American athlete necessarily.”

In contrast to NBC’s Olympic coverage, which devotes most of its attention to American competitors, Shaw wanted to expand his focus in Unseen Olympiad to athletes from many countries.

“I want a Chinese viewer to be able to enjoy this just as much an American, just as much as a Norwegian viewer, just as much as someone from Brazil, someone from Japan or elsewhere,” he said. “We all compete in things… we are all united by this obsession of sport and of culture in this way and there’s no reason that we can’t enjoy this as one group.”

The athletic footage in the documentary often is shown in slow motion or speeded up, altering the “real time” experience that’s typical of watching live sports programming. The soundscape of Unseen Olympiad was created independently of the footage, again lending to the subjective feel.

“We shot no sync sound at all. There was nothing, no time code,” sound designer/mixer Poole explained at the Q&A. “Everything that was captured in the moment was captured separately from the video. So, we had to build a soundtrack from the ground up, which was both an enormous challenge but also extremely freeing. We got to create sounds that a lot of the sportsmen and women — they’re the only ones hearing those sounds.”

Poole cited the example of table tennis footage in the documentary. “Especially you see in ping pong, where we are connecting the paddle to the ball — what does that sound like?” he commented. “It’s the only sound you hear, it’s the only feeling and emotion that you feel in that moment.”

The film is narrated in an essay-like style, alternating between portions in English and Chinese.

“Miles Labat, who is a producer and co-writer with me, and I scripted each of the phases of this process and the voiceover ultimately derives from our script,” Shaw told us. “It was paramount to have cultural consultancy along the way. So, we’ve had three main Chinese cultural consultants, but also a fourth at times. The director of the Summer World University Games is the voiceover actor of our film, and she also assisted in our rewriting and retranslating phase for Mandarin, for cultural context… She went back in and made it more poetic.”

Shaw continued, “That’s just a small example of how necessary it is to have cultural consultancy with a foreign country as an American filmmaker. It’s the levels of beauty that were revealed by just the simple change in translation of a quatrain poem — think of that but expanded over a whole film. It’s vastly different and as an American, as a white American as well, non-Asian American, non-Chinese American to make a film in any other language besides English is fairly non-traditional, especially in the sports world. For our film to serve as a cultural bridge between the United States and China, we had to make sure that we consulted with Chinese people. It had to be the case. It couldn’t just be, ‘Oh, Casey goes to China, has fun in Asia, and then he comes back and makes his thing and just takes from their culture.’ That, to me, for my work is not acceptable.”

Shaw emphasizes he has no issue with NBC Universal’s approach to covering the Olympic Games. “I think NBC is doing what they need to do and they’re getting viewership and they’re getting people into it,” he said.

But for a different view, an athlete-centric one, there is his film. “Truly, we deserve to have both,” he said. “I think ultimately we deserve to have fantastic media coverage, access to all the athletes, but we also deserve to see them in a raw emotional sense, in a state that separates the barriers between country to country, male to female, sport to sport, summer to winter.”