Beyond (2022)

Great sport-focused drama about the life of top athletes. Drama focuses a lot on the different aspects of training, and the people don't really do much outside the skating training place (which is quite realistic). Many people have ambitions to make it, but in the end, it is a combination of luck, skills and timing that determine who can be the top athletes. The story is well constructed, but nothing special. Trajectory of main lead is also very cliche and predictable. The story is mostly carried by the conversation between people.
The acting is really strong, especially the cast of the earlier timeline. I really loved many of the "side" characters as well, character development is really good here, wish we had seen even more of some of the athletes' background. The story is a bit complex and slow in the beginning, but after a few episodes you will start making sense of every connection between the past and present. It also ramps up and becomes better the second half (surprisingly for a c-drama). Would recommend to watch.

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An inspiring sports drama about a Winter Olympic discipline

Sport dramas are difficult to make in my opinion, for several reasons. First of all, scripts have to strike a balance between the technical and the human aspects to create compelling storytelling for a general audience. Second, the technical requirements present a difficult dilemma to producers and directors: do you go for athletes with hopefully decent acting skills, or do you choose real actors and train them in the basics of the sport while finding ways to film great sports scenes that remain believable? Beyond**,** a drama about the history of Chinese Olympic short-track speed skating from the 1990s to the 2022 Beijing Olympics, manages to overcome both challenges quite comfortably.

The story starts in 2014 with a young girl determined to compete and win gold medals at the highest level in the sport. Her father and coach were both former national athletes who now coach the next generation. This provides the perfect excuse to tell the struggles and dreams of those athletes back in the 1990s while balancing them with the state of the sport in the 2010s, before naturally culminating in China hosting the Winter Olympics.

From technical and medical conditions to infrastructure, training methods, and the creation of an ecosystem capable of nurturing young talent across different parts of the country before reaching the national team, everything is covered in a very solid way, with a particular emphasis on friendship, mentorship, and the lives of athletes.

The story set in the 1990s revolves around three friends whose lives represent the three main paths within the sport: the outstanding talent who finds himself alone at the top, the good athlete who simply isn't good enough to compete among the very best, and the one who is forced to abandon his passion because of an accident.

On the other hand, the story set in more recent times revolves around teamwork and the individual challenges each athlete faces in the pursuit of gold. The coaches, the former athletes themselves, serve as the link between both timelines and highlight both the evolution of the sport and the contrast between past and present from a national perspective.

One aspect that is sometimes even more touching than the series itself, at least for me, is the brief segment at the end of each of the 29 episodes dedicated to interviews with real short-track speed skating athletes and coaches, sharing their own personal stories; you can genuinely feel their passion and love for the sport. The team behind the cameras used this material to write the script, so each episode's central theme is paired with a real-life testimony told by the people who actually lived it.

The pace is really good, with an excellent intertwining of human relationships and the various sporting situations throughout the whole drama. The focus on the core groups of friends, both in the past and the present, helps us as viewers connect with and become invested in their stories, although I felt that, during the last third of the series, this focus shifted somewhat and lost part of the strong hook it had.

At that point, the drama begin introducing short stories about other members of the national team that, while being representative of the diverse conflicts and struggles modern athletes face and are still interesting in their own right, don't quite have the same emotional impact as the core characters I had grown to cherish.

I'd also like to highlight the casting and directing choices, because the resemblance between the younger and older versions of the characters is fantastic. You can immediately tell who is who in each timeline, and the performances of both the seasoned actors and the younger cast make that continuity feel completely natural. Among the latter, I'd particularly like to mention Teresa Li and Liu Yi Tie, whom some of you may know from The Long Season; they're quickly becoming two of my favourite very young actors.

All in all, it's a very inspiring story about the determination, passion, and sacrifices these elite athletes make in pursuit of their dreams, while also offering an insightful look at the advances in sports science and technology, as well as the importance of public policies that support athletic development.

I wouldn't have expected to become so invested in a drama about a sport I'd barely watched in my life, but I did.

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