The Tuscan town of Siena –at least until its tiny football team gatecrashed Serie A last year – has for several centuries been chiefly renowned (if at all) as the setting for an annual 80-second horse race known as the Palio, one of those arcane traditions along the lines of the Boat Race or the North-South Orkney Island free-for-all mass football derby. It’s reasonable to assume that even rabid sports maniacs on the Moviehouse scale are unlikely to have heard of this particular race, but John Appel’s illuminating documentary provides quite a service in bringing the Palio to a wider audience.
The set-up works thus: the town’s various districts (contrade) race against one another every summer in the town square, on horses allocated according to a lottery. Wisely, The Last Victory takes into account the average sports fan’s hatred of fence-sitting, and opts for a partisan perspective, focusing on the district of Civetta, which hasn’t won the race in twenty-three years, but whose inhabitants dream of little else.
World Cup-winning legend Paolo Rossi, a Sienese, talks us through some archive footage and leaves us in no doubt about the magnitude of the event in the locals’ lives. The star of the show, though, is a venerable 92-year-old Civettese named Egidio, a previous winner, who holds forth on the subject with a time-honoured authority reminiscent of those gnarled old grandads who’ve witnessed every All-Ireland since the War of Independence, exuding all the twinkle-eyed, raring-to-go enthusiasm of a very small boy awaiting his first taste of the race.
While most sports movies stink beyond belief, sport tends to be infinitely better served by the documentary form, as evidenced in a rash of recent gems such as The Game of Their Lives (a retrospective of North Korea’s 1966 heroics). If anything, The Last Victory is more poignant still. If you’ve a single drop of sporting blood, see it.