part from Test cricket – a hangover from lonely break times spent watching TV at school – I don’t follow any sport. I have tried over the years, but never cared enough. Yet I do have a minor sport obsession. My allegiance is to sport documentaries. The closer they stick to that simple definition, the better. I don’t want sports-doc-as-metaphor. I don’t need subplots, criminal, political or otherwise. Just give me sport, edited and laced with narrative, translated and distilled into human drama. Done well, a sport documentary can depict higher highs and lower lows than many of us experience in a lifetime. There are stakes beyond the simple act of competition. Sometimes, it is a stable job or the family someone never had; sometimes, it is mental health and the only life a person can imagine living, which gives rise to profound social and political questions. Always, it is passion, pride, character and identity. These are rich portraits of human psychology, especially of modern masculinity, as toxin and tonic. Here are some of the best. Last Chance U (Netflix) American football is a sport many in the UK know nothing about – and care about even less. I was as much a snob about it as anyone raised in a rugby-playing country. But as both entries focused on American football on this list show, its outsized position in the failing socio-economic fantasy of the “American dream” makes it a quintessential documentary setting. The first season of Last Chance U is the best. I won’t try to explain why so many gifted players end up at the minuscule East Mississippi community college, or the complexities of escaping, but stay with it for the characters and you will be richly rewarded. All or Nothing (Amazon Prime Video) Five of the 13 seasons of Amazon’s sprawling franchise focus on professional American football teams. It is the formula that works best. Each edition follows a different NFL team from the beginning to the end of a single gruelling season. After watching one or two seasons, you get a sense of how much access the makers did or didn’t get to the key characters and conversations. Where the answer to a probing question is: “Turn the camera off,” it makes for much less compelling viewing. However, the first two seasons – following the Arizona Cardinals and the Los Angeles Rams, two teams full of charismatic players – are excellent. Part of the fascination as a UK viewer lies in the sheer scale of the sport. Their team meetings take place in huge auditoriums; the colours are brighter than you thought possible; things are branded that you didn’t know could be. Equally, the way a team can abandon one city (the Rams start their season as the St Louis Rams) and arrive somewhere else to huge crowds of already-baying fans beggars belief. But amid all that, there are still people being asked to perform superhuman feats on a weekly basis – and with that all the fallout and drama you could possibly need. The Edge (BBC iPlayer) This is about what makes cricket such a complicated and high-pressure game. By extension, it is about mental health. In telling the story of the England cricket team’s rise to glory between 2009 and 2013, it almost becomes sports-doc-as-metaphor, but ultimately maintains the correct – delicate – balance. While appearing to non-fans as the most boring and pointless sport invented, cricket, as this documentary illustrates, may be the closest any sport comes to the manifestation of humankind’s most impressive skills and scariest vulnerabilities. Whether it is hour after hour of laser-eyed concentration, with relentless hostility from the sun and the mouths of your opponents; the ability to perceive minute differences in the pace and movement of a small, very hard ball; or the psyche-destroying pressure of a country’s hopes on your shoulders, cricket is savage – and excellent documentary fodder. Valley Uprising (Amazon Prime) Everyone cooed over Free Solo, but wasn’t it a bit of a one-trick pony, that trick being vertigo pornography? Wasn’t its subject, Alex Honnold, about as sympathetic as the spork he scoffed his weird meals with? The true daddy of rock climbing documentaries – with heart, thrills and a deep vein of history – is Valley Uprising. Coincidentally, it briefly features a much younger and more innocent Honnold, placing him in context as only the latest pioneer in a rich lineage of adventurous freaks and geeks. Valley Uprising portrays the birth and evolution of rock climbing, with a focus on Yosemite national park, the scale of which is hard for people from small, grey islands to grasp. The makers spent almost a decade crafting it and interviewed dozens of the sport’s legends. But you don’t have to recognise them to fall in love with them or understand the technicalities of their first ascents (with self-invented gear) to be left in awe. With a great selection of music, archive and Gilliam-esque animation, it will make those of us who climb only ladders wish we, too, could dangle off a rope 300 metres high, with no shoes on, swigging red wine. In Covid times, this one is a particularly excellent form of escapism. Ride the Divide (iTunes, paid)/Inspired to Ride (Amazon Prime Video, paid) These films, directed by Mike Dion, are about unsupported bicycle races across the US. This sport is variously referred to as ultra-distance racing and bikepacking. The latter more accurately conveys the eccentric, DIY heart of it, as well as the intense characters it attracts. Ride the Divide (2010) goes from Canada to Mexico over 2,700 miles, while Inspired to Ride (2014) goes from the west coast to the east coast of the US over 4,200 miles. Both strike the right balance for the viewer in terms of evoking horror and awe. One minute it is: “I could never do that, it looks horrific,” the next: “I would love to do that, it looks glorious.” We suffer and triumph with the riders. At times, we wonder if they are unhinged, but mostly we realise they have lots to show about what we might all be capable of and why we sometimes go to extreme lengths to prove it. Inspired to Ride is all the more poignant since the death of the British rider Mike Hall in a similar race in Australia in 2017. He is without doubt the unassuming star of Dion’s second film and a hero to root for. This article was amended on 10 March 2021 to reflect that the Rams moved to Los Angeles in 2016 from St Louis, not Cleveland.