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Time Out
21-05-2025
- Sport
- Time Out
Sydney wins gold as Australia's number one destination for sports fans
You'd be hard-pressed to find a Sydneysider who hasn't watched, let alone played, a game of sport. Whether a Test Match at the SCG, an A-League tournament at Accor Stadium, or an NRL final at your local sports bar, cheering on our top athletes is just part of daily life Down Under. And it looks like Sydney is the best place to rally around your favourite sports team, with a new study crowning Sydney as Australia's best city for a 'sportcation'. Sports travel has exploded in recent years, which Skyscanner's 2025 Travel Trends report largely credits to the rise of 'behind-the-scenes' sports shows like Netflix's Drive to Survive, Break Point and Full Swing. In 2023, Sydney hosted more than 600,000 football fans for the FIFA Women's World Cup, with thousands more set to take on our city in the inaugural Sydney World Major Marathon this August. On top of that, the report reveals that more than a quarter of Aussies plan to travel either domestically or internationally to see a sporting event in 2025. And honestly, we totally get it. Nothing beats the buzz of watching the action live, joining a Mexican wave, and maybe even having a cheeky tiff with the opposing team. While Melbourne has long held the unofficial title of Australia's sporting capital, a new study by Compare The Market has handed the baton to its rival, Sydney – crowning it as the best city for a sportcation. To determine the ranking, the travel insurance site pitted the cities against each other on seven factors, including the number of sports teams, stadiums, bars, camps and parks. Sydney took home gold as the ultimate city for sports spectators, with the highest number of sports bars and sports camps in all of Australia. We're sure this might ruffle some feathers among passionate Melburnian sports fans, who proudly took home silver. But hey, we'll give credit where it's due – Melbourne's the only city in the world to host both a tennis Grand Slam tournament and a Formula One World Championship race – both events that Sydneysiders happily travel to watch. In terms of Aussie sports teams, it's more of an even playing field. Sydney is of course the NRL capital, with nine teams compared to Melbourne's one, while the Victorian capital is the undisputed heart of AFL, with ten teams compared to Sydney's two. Sydney and Melbourne are the only two cities to have Olympic Games bragging rights in Australia, but Brisbane's time to shine is coming in 2032. The Queensland capital currently ranks as the third-best city for a sportcation, with many flying to Brissy to attend the NRL Magic Round – the world's largest festival of rugby league. Australia's most recent Commonwealth Games host city, the Gold Coast, ranked fourth, while Adelaide swooped in at fifth. This year, the South Australian capital broke records for Adelaide Airport's busiest week, with approximately 200,000 travellers descending on the city for the AFL Gather Round. Missed out on the action? You can see what other major Aussie sporting events are coming up here. The 5 best cities in Australia for a sports holiday: Sydney Melbourne Brisbane Gold Coast Adelaide
Time Out
19-05-2025
- Sport
- Time Out
Game on! Here are the five best cities for a 'sportcation' in Australia
From backyard cricket to local footy matches and tennis grand slams, sport is just part of daily life Down Under. And there's no doubt Australia is one of the best places in the world for live sports. We're the only country in the Southern Hemisphere to have hosted the Summer Olympics twice, have hosted more Commonwealth Games than any other nation, and have our own annual line-up of homegrown tournaments. Now, with more Aussie travellers switching into sports mode, we're spotlighting the top destinations to catch the action. According to Skyscanner, our growing obsession with sports travel is largely thanks to the rise of 'behind-the-scenes' sports shows like Netflix's Drive to Survive, Break Point and Full Swing. Their 2025 Travel Trends report reveals that more than a quarter of Aussies plan to travel either domestically or internationally to see a sporting event in 2025. And honestly, we totally get it. Nothing beats the buzz of watching the action live, joining a Mexican wave and maybe even having a cheeky tiffle with the opposing team. While Melbourne has long held the unofficial title of Australia's sporting capital, a new study by Compare The Market has dubbed its rival, Sydney, as the best city for a sportcation. The travel insurance site pitted the cities against each other on seven factors, including the number of sports teams, stadiums, bars, camps and parks. Sydney took home gold as the ultimate city for sports spectators, with the highest number of sports bars and sports camps in all of Australia. However, in terms of Aussie sports teams, we'd say it's an even playing field. Sydney is of course the NRL capital, with nine teams compared to Melbourne's one, while the Victorian capital is the undisputed heart of AFL with ten teams compared to Sydney's two. If you're looking to catch the action live, we say Melbourne, which took silver, is an equally great place for sports. For starters, it's the only city on the planet that hosts both a tennis Grand Slam and a Formula One World Championship race. It's also home to Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), the country's largest sports stadium, which hosts the world's highest-attended annual cricket match. Sydney and Melbourne are the only two cities to have Olympic Games bragging rights in Australia, but Brisbane 's time to shine is coming in 2032. The Queensland capital currently ranks as the third best city for a sportcation, with many flying to Brissy to attend the NRL Magic Round – the world's largest festival of rugby league. Australia's most recent Commonwealth Games host city, the Gold Coast, ranked fourth, while Adelaide swooped in at fifth. This year, the South Australian capital broke records for Adelaide Airport's busiest week, with approximately 200,000 travellers descending on the city for the AFL Gather Round. Missed out on the action? You can see what other major Aussie sporting events are coming up here. The 5 best cities in Australia for a sport getaway: Sydney Melbourne Brisbane Gold Coast Adelaide
The Guardian
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘You get hooked so quickly!' How Formula 1: Drive to Survive became the apex of TV documentaries
Tennis has Break Point. Rugby union has Six Nations: Full Contact. Nascar has Full Speed. Golf has Full Swing. Basketball has Starting 5. Cycling has Tour de France: Unchained. American football has both Quarterback and Receiver. Athletics has Sprint. What do all these documentaries have in common? They have all sprung up in the past five years or so, and are basically all the same show: if they are not full clones of Formula 1: Drive to Survive, they are heavily inspired by it. Drive to Survive thus has a claim to be one of the most influential TV documentaries of the past decade, having pioneered a simple but effective format. Every 12 months since 2019, it has delivered a new season – last week it released the seventh – that recaps what happened in the previous year's F1 championship, using behind-the-scenes access, race-day footage and retrospective interviews. Absurd as it may seem to say that this one-year time lag is the secret of Drive to Survive's success – you could hardly make a documentary about races that haven't taken place yet – it is the fundamental reason it works. Free from the distraction of hoping for a certain result, viewers who know how the story ends are keen to see it from new angles; for the participants, thoughts and actions that would have been precious secrets at the time can now be freely discussed. 'It feels like access to a world that we shouldn't be seeing,' says DTS executive producer Tom Hutchings. 'It's all the elements that you don't get from watching live sport. Viewers get hooked on that very quickly.' It helps that F1 is a sport that is more than just a game. Money and politics play a huge part in it, and the drivers are risking their lives. So there is plenty to talk about and F1 people tend to be confident, suave types, eager to crack wise and be fabulously indiscreet. 'The show lives on character,' says Hutchings. 'Fortunately, F1 is full of interesting people – ruthless competitors, decisive characters and a few egos.' In that way, Drive to Survive gets around what could be a pretty major problem with making TV about motor racing, which is that motor racing itself can be tedious. '[As well as F1 experts] it also has a loyal fanbase that isn't made up of the core F1 fandom,' Hutchings says. 'So many of our viewers watch Drive to Survive, but not the F1 races.' Attempts to replicate the global success of DTS have been mixed. While Unchained has vividly communicated how tense and brutal top-level road cycling is, and Full Swing arrived just as the sport of golf was ripped in two by a breakaway tour flush with Saudi cash, other series haven't clicked. Break Point has struggled to visualise the intrigue within tennis, a solitary, attritional sport that doesn't have players controversially switching teams or coaches giving rousing half-time team talks. Full Contact isn't as good as some other shows at hiding how reliant it is on officially sanctioned access – you rarely get the feeling of peeking behind the curtain and being told something that the speaker is taking a risk by revealing. All the above series do, however, share another straightforward but crucial quality, which is that they look at the sport as a whole, rather than making the same mistake as the show that previously tried to kickstart a new era in sports documentaries. Prime Video's All or Nothing, itself inspired by the godfather of the genre, HBO's Hard Knocks, focuses on a different football team each year, which is a problem if you're not a fan of that team. Not favouring any particular competitor makes a sports documentary more agile: when the 2023 F1 season turned out to be a boring procession won comfortably by Max Verstappen and Red Bull Racing, Drive to Survive switched to telling smaller stories about less famous drivers. One series that has made the one-team approach work is Welcome to Wrexham, the Disney+ documentary about the Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney buying a decrepit non-league football club and attempting to revive it. Influenced by Netflix's superb Sunderland 'Til I Die, it plays on the effect of the team's previous failures on the fragile working-class community surrounding the stadium. Whether it can keep its underdog charm as Wrexham rise through the league system is debatable – if it can, it will be because it keeps telling relatable stories. 'At the end of the day, they are still like you and me,' says Hutchings of the F1 superstars – an improbable claim, but one that sums up the suspension of disbelief that makes Drive to Survive and its imitators so gripping. 'We all make decisions every day – we all laugh and cry. If we can tell those human stories in a fun way, that seems to keep the audience happy.' Formula 1: Drive to Survive is on Netflix
New York Times
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Carlos Alcaraz's Netflix documentary release date is confirmed
Carlos Alcaraz's Netflix docuseries, 'Carlos Alcaraz: My Way', will be released April 23. The production, which follows Alcaraz's 2024 season — in which the 21-year-old Spaniard won the French Open, Wimbledon and an Olympic silver medal — confirmed the release through Netflix, but Alcaraz had already done it via a very different medium. Advertisement Per expectation, Alcaraz's new tattoo debuted at Indian Wells, Calif. put the release date for the documentary in plain sight. He uses tattoos to commemorate his titles, with a date (September 11 2022), the Eiffel Tower and a strawberry to designate the U.S. Open, the French Open and Wimbledon respectively. Netflix has now added marketing to his ink, with 23.4.25 joining the roster on a temporary basis. The Alcaraz series is Netflix's first serious foray into tennis media since 'Break Point,' which it canceled in 2024, after two seasons. It has staged a match, the so-called Netflix Slam between Alcaraz and Rafael Nadal, but 'Break Point' was a limited success in comparison to its siblings, 'Drive to Survive' (Formula One) and 'Full Swing' (golf). Since its release, Roger Federer, Naomi Osaka and Ons Jabeur have released documentaries, while Novak Djokovic has one in the works. Netflix will also produce a docuseries on Nadal, following the events of his retirement season in 2024. GO DEEPER Game, Set, Action: How tennis documentaries found the spotlight - and lost some teeth Analysis from tennis writer Charlie Eccleshare Documentaries like these are becoming the best that fans can hope to expect as top athletes tighten their control over their intellectual property and their identities. Why risk something that could damage their reputation by handing over control to a journalist or film maker? Much better to retain control by doing it themselves. Even 'Break Point', which contained little in the way of bombshell revelations, was off-putting for some players because of their editorial control they gave up. Player-run media is only growing, with Jannik Sinner and Elena Rybakina announcing YouTube channels in recent weeks. Sinner's first episode, an Australian Open diary of his journey to a second title in Melbourne, featured such revelations: He's friendly to his drivers; he likes to drive golf carts kind of fast around Melbourne Park's service roads; Grand Slam final days are very special to him and still feel rare. Advertisement Perhaps fans will be pleasantly surprised by this series from Alcaraz, one of the more candid players on tour, but realistically any program in which the subject has final sign-off is likely to be an extremely polished and airbrushed version of reality. Tennis documentaries can often border on hagiography, and why wouldn't they when the whole purpose is to make the subject look good. GO DEEPER Netflix and tennis: Why did Break Point fail? This isn't to say that they can't be interesting, with behind-the-scenes views of athletes who live their lives on a stage one of the only routes to understanding what goes on away from it. At Wimbledon last year, it was fun to watch BBC footage of Alcaraz darting around between interviews trying to catch a glimpse of Spain's Euro 2024 matches, whether on his phone or on television screens in the media centre. Still, the best sporting documentaries are the ones where the subject matter is not in control of the content. Think 'Sunderland 'Til I Die', or proper sporting documentaries from years past like ESPN's '30 for 30' series. This Alcaraz series, by contrast, is part of a growing trend in which top athletes take more and more production control into their own hands. Sorry if this all sounds like a gloomy prediction of the show's merits, but I'm still scarred by having to watch French footballer Paul Pogba's 'Pogmentary': A show that 14,000 IMDB users gave an average rating of 1.1/10.
Yahoo
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Review: Gagged by lawyers, Drive To Survive fails to tell the real Christian Horner story
With some of the newer additions to Netflix's fly-on-the-wall sports documentary canon falling by the wayside in recent months – Six Nations Full Contact, Tour de France Unchained, Break Point – it is worth noting that the OG of this format, Formula 1: Drive to Survive, is still going strong. 'DTS' (so big it has its own acronym) is more relentless than Max Verstappen with the scent of Lando Norris in his nostrils. Season 7 is released this Friday and will be eagerly anticipated by DTS fans, not least because it deals with two of the more explosive Formula One storylines of recent times. Namely, Lewis Hamilton's shock move to Ferrari, and the Christian Horner Red Bull allegations, both of which occurred over the winter of 2023-24. Given the grade A material at its disposal, expectations will doubtless be high. But fans are likely to be only partially satisfied by a 10-episode series which has its moments but does not quite make the most of its spicy ingredients. For a start, those two storylines are largely dealt with in episode one, entitled 'Business as Usual', which as anyone who followed the Red Bull rumpus of 12 months ago will remember was the phrase Horner deployed whenever he was asked whether the allegations of inappropriate behaviour levelled at him by a female Red Bull employee had destabilised the team. The amount of content that Netflix must have mined this time 12 months ago might have filled an entire 10-episode series on its own. One suspects the lawyers must have been extremely busy over the winter to par it down to what is actually shown here. That does include a delicious opening sequence to episode one, before the credits even roll, in which Horner and his wife, Geri Halliwell, get into their 4x4 at Horner Towers and set off on a trip somewhere, waxing lyrical about the season just gone (2023). 'Can you believe the year you've had?' Geri asks. 'The statistics are crazy,' Horner nods in response, reeling them off one by one. '21 out of 22 races [won]. Broke the record for the most wins in a year, the most podiums in a year, the most poles to wins in a year, the most points in a year, the biggest winning margin ever…' Of course, you know what is coming down the tracks so the hubris is writ large, even before Geri utters: 'The truth is, you never know what life's going to bring.' You certainly don't. Episode one is, unsurprisingly, the strongest of the 10. There are some memorable moments – Halliwell arriving hand-in-hand with Horner at the first race in Bahrain, rictus smile on her face; Horner calling Zak Brown a 'p----' after leaving a press conference in the Gulf kingdom in which the McLaren chief executive called for greater 'transparency' in the Red Bull investigation (apparently it was 'c---' in the original but the final version is sanitised); Halliwell kissing Jos Verstappen after his son's victory in that race, which must have required superhuman effort on her part, especially given he then went and called publicly for her husband to go. But even with all the material at its disposal it is impossible for producers Box to Box to truly convey just how febrile the atmosphere was in Bahrain, or the following race in Saudi Arabia as (which is dealt with very perfunctorily). It is the same with Hamilton's departure from Mercedes (which is relegated to the second storyline of episode one despite being arguably the biggest move in F1 history). The sense of awkwardness between Hamilton and Toto Wolff at the car launch in February is palpable, such as when Wolff goes in for a hug and Hamilton offers his hand, or when Hamilton offers very limited feedback on the car in Bahrain. But there was likely a whole lot more we did not see. This was a 24-race divorce, remember, which got so awkward that at one stage anonymous emails were being sent to the press purporting to be from an employee at Brackley and falsely accusing 'spurned' Wolff of endangering Hamilton's life by sending him out on dodgy tyres in revenge for Hamilton moving to Ferrari (the email was referred to Northamptonshire police, who took no further action). There are some other nice moments in episode two, 'Frenemies', which deals with Norris's relationship with Max Verstappen, and offers plenty of insight. Norris is superb at showing vulnerability. Episode five, 'Le Curse of Leclerc', which follows the Ferrari driver in the week of his home race of Monaco, where Leclerc has always suffered dreadful luck but which he eventually wins in memory of his father Herve, who died just before Leclerc made it as a fully-fledged F1 driver. Episode seven 'In the Heat of the Night' is also insightful, with Norris, Leclerc, Alex Albon, George Russell and Pierre Gasly equipped with special Netflix phones for the Singapore weekend and asked to document their antics. In between the banter and the joshing, you can see the complex social and professional dynamics at play between these drivers who first raced each other in karting. Russell and Albon teasing Norris about flying on a private jet with Verstappen ('Oh yeah, Lando wouldn't want to fly commercial would he? He's too big-time for that!'). Or Norris taking the mickey out of himself. 'I think my nob's gone,' says the McLaren driver as he lounges in an ice bath post-race. 'It's shrunk from 6-3!' 'Centimetres?' asks the Netflix camera operator. These are the moments in which DTS excels, when you are offered unvarnished glimpses of the drivers. Russell absolutely banjaxed after the Singapore race, hyperventilating behind a closed door. Or amusing insights, such as when the same driver pulls a duvet and a pillow out of his luggage. But so much of it is clearly scripted, and the increasing use of partners/wives/girlfriends/friends to carry out 'private chats' as a means of developing a narrative is off-putting. For instance Susie Wolff talking to her husband about Hamilton's departure over breakfast in Monaco (although the Mercedes team boss does reveal he had an agreement with Hamilton not to talk to Verstappen, which he notes he is now free to do). All in all, it's the usual bag. DTS fans will love it. And those who feel Netflix is the tail now wagging the F1 dog will hate it. You have to admire the fact that it continues to go from strength to strength though. Yep they know what they are doing, these Netflix guys. 'In Formula 1, there's winners and w-----s. And you don't want to be in the w-----s category,' remarks Horner at one point. F1 fans will enjoy being able to make their own minds up once more as to who belongs in which. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
