‘Seconds Away’ Is A Five-Years-In-The-Making Sports Documentary About An Olympic Dream

AUSTIN—The first minutes of “Seconds Away,” the breathless sports documentary focused on the 2020 Olympic quest of Belgian-American athlete Peter Callahan, is a showcase of the stripped-down nature of professional track and field in America and the extent some athletes will go to chase after their athletic dreams.

Inside the Nike Track and Field Center at The Armory, a historic indoor track and field venue in Manhattan, New York featuring a 200-meter track, the camera captures the frenetic pace for which Callahan, an NCAA champion for Princeton in 2013, was exerting over 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 the number of non-descript events held that year.

But even then, the assumption was quite clear: Every race matters.

Still, deep beneath the surface, there was much more than this single 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 delayed to 2021.

By film’s end, after trips to Boston, Massachusetts; Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee; Flagstaff, Arizona; and Antwerp, Belgium, to track Callahan’s journey toward qualifying for the Tokyo Olympics – he sought an Olympic ‘A’ standard qualifying time of 3 minutes and 35 seconds over 1,500 meters – director Benjamin Kegan said the story finally came to an end, just about two-and-a-half years after it first began.

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

Callahan failed to reach his goal. He did not become an Olympian.

On Oct. 26, “Seconds Away” made its North American premiere at the Austin Film Festival.

“As a filmmaker, as someone coming into this world and asking, ‘What can I observe?’ I kind of wanted to give someone that experience of knowing what it was like to be there,” said Kegan, who had worked on one full-length documentary before this project, his 2020 documentary ‘Expiration Term of Service.’ “And it was satisfying afterward to hear people say, ‘Oh, that felt reflected.’”

How Did The Austin Film Festival’s “Seconds Away” Originate

While the project initially began as a short documentary on the Olympic aspirations held by Callahan, who is a native of the same town Kegan grew up in, it expanded after tangential moments shifted the story’s structure into something much more powerful.

In 2019, as Callahan was training to hit the Olympic standard for the second time since the 2016 Rio Olympics (where he was also just shy of his goal in the 1,500-meter distance by 1.6 seconds), his long-time 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, in some ways, became secondary to the greater life-threatening race McHugh was living. “It’s a vulnerable thing to open your doors and your life,” Callahan said at one point. The film didn’t originally intend to tell a cancer story.

Kegan and his director of photography, Sean Webley, veered as the story took them, going on to capture McHugh during his many radiation and chemotherapy treatments.

And therein came the true essence of the film, which transformed from a rich sports story into a deeply-moving human narrative. When the pandemic came in March 2020, Callahan was once again thrust into a difficult position: His ambitions were being delayed, again and again. He spent time in Flagstaff at altitude to train. Meanwhile, McHugh, who was battling treatments back home, coached through telephone conversations and Zoom.

Kegan said the film required financial discipline. He bootstrapped funding from a number of investors, including one of the film’s final pieces in Belgian. He and Webley largely shot the film as a two-man team. “We got funding from it from investors and things like that,” he said. “We did a GoFundMe to shoot in Belgium. But all of that was going toward what you saw on screen.”

Large stretches captured Callahan’s daily rituals, training runs, and the laborious hours a professional runner takes on – such as shoveling one lane of the track during an Illinois snow storm. And much like the legendary sports documentary “Hoop Dreams,” Kegan and Webley captured a slice of life in a way that is not often presented on screen for professional runners.

Impactful Moments From The Austin Film Festival’s “Seconds Away” Documentary

As the races piled on and the deadline to hit the Olympic standard was becoming more pressure-cooked, Callahan’s hopes began to shrink. The film gained clarity not from Callahan himself but from his colleagues – Olympians like Robby Andrews and Donn Cabral.

In one night time scene shot over a fire, Andrews and Cabral reminisced on their successes and shortcomings, even as they achieved the highest threads of the sport on the Olympic stage. Later, as Callahan sat on a hillside following another failed qualifying attempt in New York, a fellow runner blurted out: “This is all I have. I don’t have a great job waiting for me after I’m finished.”

The film’s final races zero in on Callahan’s chase after the elusive time of 3:35. In Portland, with the Olympic qualifying deadline narrowing in, he runs the fastest he’s ever run, clocking a time of 3:36.15.

It was not enough to bag a qualifying spot for his hopes of representing his mother’s home country, but he did go on to 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 final cap for Callahan, too. Five races later, he retired from professional running in 2021.

“The point of this whole thing was to prove that I could chase it,” Callahan said at the premiere. “It was to prove that I had the discipline to pursue this in a meaningful way that felt legitimate. And I’ve done that.”