The Olympics may be over, but Murder Made Fiction podcast still has a few Olympic crimes to unpack.
After spending the first half of the month looking at the curious case of Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding across a variety of films, including an exceptional 30 for 30 episode, the surprisingly savvy released-the-same-year-as-the-crime NBC satire Nancy and Tonya: The Inside Story, and Craig Gillespie’s big budget Hollywood film I, Tonya, Jenn and I are turning our attention to the singlet game.
That’s right, we’re talking wrestling and the shocking murder that occurred on Foxcatcher farm.
John du Pont was an eccentric multi-millionaire, philanthropist, and sports enthusiast living in Pennsylvania in the 80s/90s. He owned a large expanse of land that was dubbed Foxcatcher Farm and in the late 80s, he set it up as the pre-eminent training ground for the US Olympic Wrestling team (despite his mother’s fears that it was a “low” sport).
After luring the brothers Schultz – Dave (the elder) and Mark (the youngest) – to come aboard as coaches, the team appeared to be on good footing for the 1992 Seoul Olympics thanks to its new benefactor.
But over time, du Pont’s behavior turned increasingly erratic as the man became more possessive, more jealous, and more paranoid.
The 2016 Netflix documentary Team Foxcatcher is a good primer that outlines du Pont’s bizarre obsession with Dave Schultz, what life was like on the farm for Schultz’s wife Nancy (one of the doc’s executive producers) and some of the more alarming warning signs that du Pont was headed towards a break-down. Chief among these was a hard shift into racist behavior that resulted in the firing of all of the Black athletes, as well as multiple instances where athletes were threatened at gunpoint.
https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=BDA5556156528
Bennett Miller‘s 2014 Hollywood film, Foxcatcher, takes a different approach, centering on the sibling rivalry between Dave (Mark Ruffalo) and Mark (Channing Tatum) and focusing on du Pont (Steve Carrell, hidden under distracting facial prosthetics) as a predatory figure.
https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=BDA8128594561
Both texts offer something unique, although neither is without fault. The doc is biased towards Nancy’s perspective and fails to include Mark at all. The feature film, on the other hand, suffers from a drawn out screenplay that leans into the story’s salacious elements and has an abrupt and unsatisfying end.
What is most surprising is that neither text has much curiosity about the obvious mental illness from which John du Pont suffered. Both are content merely to list or document his unusual behaviour in the period leading up to the murder. They work well as a pairing, though; there are oversights and gaps in one that are somewhat rectified in the other, so watching them together results in a more complete experience.
Ultimately what becomes evident in both is the pervasive sense of things unravelling on Foxcatcher farm, almost as if violence and death were inevitable the minute du Pont was allowed to seize control of the US wrestling team’s entire Olympic dream.
Next time: we’re wrapping up Olympic coverage with a look at the fall from grace of Olympic para-athlete Oscar Pistorius, who shot and killed his girlfriend in South Africa. Tune in to hear how the 2017 Lifetime film Oscar Pistorius: Blade Runner Killer handles this true crime case.
Want even more Murder Made Fiction? Be sure to check out the pod’s Patreon feed, where Jenn and I have ~134 hours of content including a bear attack double feature with Grizzly Night and Cocaine Bear and discussions about last year’s most powerful true crime documentaries: The Perfect Neighbor, Predators, and Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke.