“We are all familiar with sportscasts images: sprinters hunched over in their starting blocks, waiting for the starting pistol, long-distance athletes running round after round on the tartan track. They have become a common sight for TV viewers. In Sprinters, Sam Blair wrests fascinating new images from this apparent normality. In the course of the two months preceding the seasons start, he accompanied a handful of British sprinters during their training once again highlighting the extraordinary.

Blair has shot his film strictly from an observers perspective, without interviews or statements. In a rigorous sound-image composition nurtured by an aesthetic camera and implacable editing, the filmmaker bends his theme into shape, delivering a breathtaking account of everyday training, in which winning and losing, exploits and failures, are separated by a hundredth of a second.”