‘Seconds Away’ is a five-year sports documentary about an Olympic dream

AUSTIN– The opening minutes of “Seconds Away,” the breathtaking sports documentary focused on Belgian-American athlete Peter Callahan’s 2020 Olympic quest, are a showcase of the stripped-down nature of professional athletics in America and the extent to which some athletes will pursue their athletic dreams.

At the Nike Track and Field Center at The Armory, a historic indoor track and field venue in Manhattan, New York with a 200-meter track, the camera captures the frenetic pace Callahan, an NCAA champion for Princeton in 2013, set himself during one of the countless 1,500-meter races he had run in his life. By then, the Evanston, Ilinois native was 28 years old, unsponsored and racing against quasi-professionals, in one of a number of low-profile events held that year.

But even then the premise was pretty clear: Every race is important.

Yet deep beneath the surface there was much more than this one race, including a story that would unravel layer upon layer, from a coach battling throat cancer, to a world shutdown due to the pandemic – and the Tokyo Olympics being postponed until 2021.

Towards the end of the film, after traveling to Boston, Massachusetts; Nashville and Memphis, Tenn.; Flagstaff, Arizona; and Antwerp, Belgium, to follow Callahan’s journey to qualifying for the Tokyo Olympics – he aimed for an Olympic ‘A’ standard qualifying time of 3 minutes and 35 seconds over 1,500 meters – director Benjamin Kegan said the story was finally coming to an end, some two and a half years after it first began.

And yet there was no glory at the end of the tunnel.

Callahan failed to achieve his goal. He didn’t become an Olympian.

On October 26 “Seconds away” had its North American premiere at the Austin Film Festival.

“As a filmmaker, as someone who comes into this world and asks, ‘What can I observe?’ I wanted to give someone the experience of knowing what it was like to be there,” says Kegan, who had been working on a full-length documentary before this project, his 2020 documentary.Service Expiration Period.’ “And it was satisfying afterwards to hear people say, ‘Oh, that felt reflected.'”

How did the Austin Film Festival’s ‘Seconds Away’ come about?

Although the project initially started as a short documentary about the Olympic ambitions of Callahan, born in the same town where Kegan grew up, it expanded after tangential moments changed the structure of the story into something much more powerful.

In 2019, as Callahan was training to meet the Olympic standard for the second time since the 2016 Rio Olympics (where he also came just 1.6 seconds shy of his goal in the 1,500 meters), his longtime coach Patrick McHugh — who was also his high school coach at North Shore Country Day a decade earlier in 2009 — was diagnosed with a form of throat cancer.

Callahan’s pursuit became in some ways secondary to the larger life-threatening race that McHugh lived. “It’s a vulnerable thing to open your doors and your life,” Callahan said at one point. The film was not originally intended to tell a cancer story.

Kegan and his director of photography, Sean Webley, changed the story and then captured McHugh during his many radiation and chemotherapy treatments.

And therein emerged the true essence of the film, which transformed from a rich sports story to a deeply moving human story. When the pandemic broke out in March 2020, Callahan once again found himself in a difficult position: his ambitions were postponed again and again. He spent time in Flagstaff at high altitude training. Meanwhile, McHugh, who was struggling with treatments at home, coached via phone calls and Zoom.

Kegan said the film required financial discipline. He received financing from a number of investors, including one of the last parts of the film in Belgian. He and Webley made the film largely as a two-man team. “We got financing out of it from investors and things like that,” he said. “We did a GoFundMe shot in Belgium. But it all went towards what you saw on the screen.”

Large pieces captured Callahan’s daily rituals, training runs and the grueling hours a professional runner puts in, such as shoveling a track on the track during an Illinois snowstorm. And just like the legendary sports documentary “Hoop dreams”, Kegan and Webley captured a slice of life in a way not often presented on screen by professional runners.

Impactful moments from the Austin Film Festival documentary ‘Seconds Away’

As the races piled up and the deadline to meet the Olympic standard came under increasing pressure, Callahan’s hopes began to dwindle. The film gained clarity not from Callahan himself, but from his peers – Olympians like Robby Andrews and Donn Cabral.

In a nighttime scene filmed over a fire, Andrews and Cabral reminisced about their successes and shortcomings, even reaching the sport’s highest levels on the Olympic podium. Later, as Callahan sat on a hill after another failed qualifying attempt in New York, a fellow runner blurted out, “This is all I have. There’s no great job waiting for me after I’m done.”

The final film races come down to Callahan’s chase after the elusive time of 3:35. In Portland, as the deadline for Olympic qualification approaches, he runs the fastest he has ever run, with a time of 3:36.15.

It wasn’t enough to secure a qualifying spot for his hopes of representing his mother’s home country, but he did win a national championship – the only senior title of his career – just five days later, forcing him to wonder: Was it all worth it?

The story ended there, but in other ways it was also the last limit for Callahan. Five races later, he retired from professional running in 2021.

“The point of this whole thing was to prove that I could go after it,” Callahan said during the premiere. “It was to prove that I had the discipline to pursue this in a meaningful way that felt legitimate. And I did that.”