Of Miracles and Men by Jonathan Hock, and: Red Army by Gabe Polsky (review)

Named the greatest sports moment of the twentieth century by Sports Illustrated, the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s victory over the Soviet Union at the 1980 Winter Games has been the subject of books, documentaries, and the 2004 theatrical film Miracle. For the game’s thirty-fifth anniversary, two documentary films offered a new perspective on the match by exploring how the players on the Soviet side experienced the loss at Lake Placid.

Red Armywas widely praised when released in January 2015. Directed by Gabe Polsky, the film centers on Hall-of-Fame defenseman Viacheslav (Slava) Fetisov, who played for the Soviet national teams of the 1980s and then the National Hockey League’s New Jersey Devils and Detroit Red Wings. Premiering a few weeks later as part of ESPN Films’ 30 for 30series, Jonathan Hock’s Of Miracles and Menexamines the Lake Placid game in detail and sets the loss within the broader history of Soviet hockey.

As both films show, the story of Soviet hockey reveals much about the links between sport and politics in the postwar Soviet Union. Canadian hockey, as it had been called, was adopted only after World War II. The key figure in the early development of Soviet hockey was Anatoli Tarasov, who served at times as coach of both the Moscow-based Red Army club team and the national side. Tarasov developed a new style of play and new methods of training. Under his leadership, the national team quickly rose to the top of international hockey, winning the world championship in 1954 and Olympic gold in 1956. By the 1960s, the Soviets were the world’s dominant team. Tarasov recognized, however, that the best players were not the amateurs who competed at the Olympics and world championships. They were the National Hockey League’s (NHL) Canadian professionals. This would be the true test for Soviet hockey, and the coach believed that the system he had invented, with its emphasis on team play, would prove superior.

Tarasov’s dream of playing Canadian professionals came about in 1972 (although he was removed as coach after a stand-off with Soviet authorities). Hock’s film gives due attention to the Summit Series, in which a team of NHL all-stars faced the Soviet national squad in eight games played in Canada and the Soviet Union. Canada won the series, four games to three (one game ended in a tie), but only after the Philadelphia Flyers’ Bobby Clarke broke the ankle of the Soviets’ best player, Valeri Kharlamov, with a vicious slash. Kharlamov is an important figure in the history of Soviet hockey, and he is featured at key points in the film. He is introduced early on when Slava Fetisov visits the neighborhood of his childhood and stops at the apartment block where Kharlamov’s grandfather lived. “I hope we play on the same team one day,” Kharlamov told the younger Fetisov at their first meeting. Later in the film, we see Fetisov bringing flowers to Kharlamov’s grave after the great player’s death in a 1981 car accident.

The directors take very different approaches to the 1980 game between the Soviets and Americans. Hock devotes some twenty-five minutes to the contest, using lengthy footage from ABC’s television broadcast and interspersing Al Michaels’s commentary with Curt Chaplin’s live-radio call and the original Russian call. The central thread in this treatment of the game is Fetisov’s return to Lake Placid, accompanied by his twenty-one-year-old daughter. His account of the game, as told to his daughter, is framed by interviews with other former players, including team captain Boris Mikhailov and goaltender Vladislav Tretiak. A highlight of the film is Tretiak’s narration of Mark Johnson’s goal at the end of the first period, which tied the score at 2–2. The segment is a rare instance of an elite athlete...