Flying Scotsman - Alone to the goal

Movie
German title	Flying Scotsman - Alone to the goal
Original title	The Flying Scotsman
Country of production	United Kingdom , Germany
original language	English
Publishing year	2006
length	103 minutes
Age rating	FSK 6
Rod
Director	Douglas Mackinnon
script	John Brown , ; Declan Hughes , ; Simon Rose
production	Peter Broughan , ; Peter Gallagher , ; Sara Giles , ; Damita Nikapota
music	Martin Phipps
camera	Gavin Finney
cut	Colin Monie
occupation
	Jonny Lee Miller : Graeme Obree ; Billy Boyd : Malky McGovern; Laura Fraser : Anne Obree; Morven Christie : Katie; Steven Berkoff : Ernst Hagemann; Brian Cox : Douglas Baxter;

Flying Scotsman - sole aim (original title: The Flying Scotsman ) is a sports movie - drama from the year 2006 by director Douglas Mackinnon with Jonny Lee Miller in the title role.

action

Graeme Obree grew up as a child as an outsider, partly because of his Scottish father's job as a police officer. He is harassed, humiliated and harassed by people of the same age from his neighborhood. At Christmas he gets a racing bike from his parents, which initially serves as a means of escape from his tormentors, but which later remains his preferred means of transport.

As an adult, Graeme lived in Glasgow, Scotland , in 1993 with wife Anna and a small child. He had to give up his own bike shop and now works as a bike courier . He met his work colleague Malky McGovern, who was also a cycling enthusiast, and made friends with him.

Graeme came up with the idea to turn the handlebars of his racing bike to achieve a more aerodynamic posture. He learns that Chris Boardman plans to break the world hour record of 51.15 km set by Francesco Moser in 1984 in nine weeks . He decided to beat the world record in eight weeks and developed a revolutionary new wheel design for it. His bicycle, which he built himself from spare parts, scrap metal and parts of a washing machine, which he constructed strictly according to the laws of aerodynamics and which allows him an extremely streamlined seating position, is known as Old Faithful .

His friend Malky is supposed to find sponsors to finance the world record attempt and is appointed his new manager. After signing a sponsorship contract with a company, they can rent the Norwegian Hamar Stadium for 24 hours with the official timekeepers.

In Hamar, Graeme is surprised by Malky with a new bike, which Malky had made according to Graeme's specifications by bike designer Mike Burrows . He misses the world record by two laps, but wants to try again the next morning. At night he gets up every two hours to do stretching exercises. The next morning he set a new world record on Old Faithful with 51.59 km. As is so often the case, however, Graeme falls back into depression after his success , which is later diagnosed as bipolar disorder .

A week later, Chris Boardman beats Graemes world record in Bordeaux and reaches 52.27 km. Graeme now decides to compete in the 1993 World Track Cycling Championships in Hamar, which starts in five weeks. Graeme competes there in the single pursuit at 4000 meters and meets his arch-rival Chris Boardman in the semifinals, who competes against Graeme's self-made Old Faithful on a computer-designed £ 500,000 professional carbon fiber bike . Graeme beats Boardman with a new world record time and also wins the final of the world championship.

He took part in a show race in St. Vallery, France, and was enthusiastically received. In the meantime, at the headquarters of the World Cycling Association, the sports officials are worried about their lucrative sponsorship contracts, as the manufacturers of expensive professional bikes don't like the fact that someone breaks records with Graeme on a self-made bike. The World Cycling Federation then announced that they consider Graeme's posture to be dangerous and against the guidelines. Graeme then reveals to the press a “safe racing bike” with bolted-on training wheels to ridicule the arguments of the sports officials. The World Cycling Federation is now always coming up with new guidelines to hinder Graeme.

At the 1994 Track Cycling World Championships in Palermo , the World Cycling Federation issued a new rule the night before the race stating that the arms must not be against the chest, which is aimed at Graeme, as he is the only participant who has his arms is close to the chest. Graeme is eventually disqualified and loses his world title.

Graeme falls into depression again and tries to commit suicide, but the rope on which he wants to hang himself breaks and he survives. He managed to return to professional sport at the Track Cycling World Championships in 1995 in Bogotá , where he started again with a radically new sitting posture in which the arms were stretched far forward, which is what gave it the name Superman posture. In the single pursuit at 4000 m against Andrea Collinelli , he finally won back the world title.

background

The film is based on the life story of Graeme Obree, who worked as a consultant on the film. For the feature film, however, some changes had to be made, in particular names were changed to avoid legal problems. The World Cycling Federation UCI is named WCF in the film and the Dutch chairman Hein Verbruggen became a German named Ernst Hagemann in the film.

The production of the film took a total of 12 years and cost around 11 million US dollars, at least on paper. In 1994, the screenwriter Simon Rose made the plan to produce a film based on the autobiography Flying Scotsman: The Graeme Obree Story (German book title: Flying Scotsman ). Filming was scheduled to begin in 2002. A few days before the start of shooting, an important US investor died, so that the financing of the film was no longer secured. It took another three years to secure pre-production with Damita Nikapota. Producer Broughan fell out with director Mackinnon and tried to fire the director, who refused to leave the project and was able to assert himself. Shooting of the film began when all the details were not yet in the towel, but it was not until the film was edited that it became apparent that the funding was so short that the film could not be completed. The producers had accumulated such a high mountain of debt that the production company had to file for bankruptcy. Only the intervention of producer Sara Giles with an advance of four million US dollars from her private fortune finally made the completion of the film possible.

Filming began on July 7, 2006 and ended on September 4, 2006. The film was shot in the Scottish county of Ayrshire , in Glasgow and in the Velodrome of Cologne and Kaarst , as well as the old town of Hattingen .

The film grossed around US $ 1.26 million at box offices around the world, including around US $ 392,000 in the UK and US $ 100,000 in Germany. In the rental market, the film had sales of $ 2.6 million in the first four weeks.

The world premiere took place on August 14, 2006 when the film opened the 60th Edinburgh International Film Festival . It was released in the UK on June 29, 2007, and on July 5, 2007 in Germany.

Reviews

“It's a dignified, calm film that brings the protagonist's obsession with cycling, his rebellious character and his struggle with his inner demons, alcoholism and depression, to life in beautiful, calm images. The great Jonny Lee Miller (made famous for his role in ' Trainspotting ') plays Obree as a lovable, driven person who trusts few people and vacillates between periods of burning ambition and periods of doubt and self-hatred. [...] The otherwise very authentic film has dispensed with a dramatic episode that Graeme Obree tells in his autobiography. In person, UCI boss Hein Verbruggen took to the track in Palermo to disqualify Obree - and at the last moment was able to save himself with a jump from the flying Scotsman, who was racing towards him. "

- Berliner Zeitung

“The fight of the rebel against the establishment is staged here with a lot of wit, but Obree's story also has a dark side, because the exceptional athletic talent suffered from severe depression at times. And so the flying Scot threatens to end up as a 'hanging Scotsman' right at the beginning of the film. "

- The daily newspaper

“Director Douglas Mackinnon and his lead actor Jonny Lee Miller use this true story to celebrate true sportsmanship to the best of their ability. Unfortunately, the initially touching and amusing film rushes through Obree's life as quickly as the hero rushes through the landscape and gets more and more off the track when he becomes the victim of persistent childhood trauma and envious functionaries. "

- The mirror

"Based on the true story of the cycling world champion Graeme Obree, a sympathetically designed sports film that dispenses with the usual clichés of the genre and condenses into an exciting tragedy."

- Lexicon of international film