Other films that ranked high during one year but did not make the overall top 15 ranking:
2007: Video Stride: Hawaii (11th),
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (15th)
2006: The Olympiad Series: The 1500 Meters (10th),
Ultimate Athlete: Pushing the Limit (14th),
America’s Greatest Olympians (15th)
2005: Olympica: America's Gold (12th),
Run for the Dream: The Gail Devers Story (15th)
How these rankings were assembled and analysis:
Amazon.com has been a reliable and popular site to obtain running films and RunningMovies.com has been linking to their site since 2002. In order to obtain these popularity rankings, statistics about both how many people have clicked through to the item as well as how many items have been purchased were taken into account. Ranking for clicks and purchases were individually ranked and then the combined points were used to determine the winner for each year. Just like in a decathlon, the winner can be the one with the most solid performance in each event (in this case year rank) without having to win any particular year as shown by the DVD ranking of The Olympic Series. Although Fire on the Track: The Steve Prefontaine Story did not win either the DVD or VHS category, when the two categories were combined it became the clear overall winner. Some of the recently released titles, like Dancing the Bear and The Runner: Extreme UltraRunner David Horton, have not be available for a long enough period to have an impact on such a multi year ranking although they both were highly rated in 2007. It must be noted that the statistics were provided by Amazon.com which includes about half of the titles that are currently available to purchase. Other sources that produce and exclusively distribute their own productions, such as ChampionshipProductions.com or other smaller independent distributors, did not have an opportunity to be included in these rankings due to lack of statistics. Results from titles that were part of a series, like the eight tape (16 title) collection, The Olympiad Greatest Moments, were not combined into an overall ranking, and would likely perform well as four titles in the top 15 VHS with many others following closely behind. Individual years ’02 -’04 were not listed above as there were many ties and a broad range of titles would make this lists more extensive. Statistics from those three years were used in the calculation of the overall rankings.
There has been a trend that both more items have been made available and more total items have been purchased in each subsequent year. The number of DVDs released has grown tremendously since 2002 (as shown by over four times the amount of titles being purchased in 2007). VHS tapes have started to loose popularity as a format, however some titles have only been available in VHS, such as Endurance. If Endurance is released in DVD format (Sign up to show interest and be notified) there may be a strong resurgence in popularity of this film, especially with Haile Gebrselassie continuing to dominate in the longer running distances. It is very clear that once Fire on the Track: The Steve Prefontaine Story was released in DVD format in 2006 that people have preferred this format over the VHS tape. In a 2006 poll at this site the readers voted this film #1, increasing the awareness of this documentary. There is no doubt that the films highlighting Steve Prefontaine has been widely popular, with three titles making the top 10 in these all time rankings. Seven of the top 10 films have been featured as a "Movie of the Month", showing that even titles not featured can still produce a great deal of interest. These rankings will be updated in 2008 after the new numbers have been tallied.
