Story
The film opens in the dead of night in the Turkish mountains. Headlights cut through trees, a torch beam shakes across an empty road, and two men call out into the dark: “Abdullah, we can’t find you, we’re sorry.” Only silence answers. From the first frame, the man at the centre of this film can vanish completely. Throughout, a recurring image returns us to a blacked-out studio, where Abdullah pedals alone, sweat running down his
face, his breathing building to a roar before the cut to black.
Chasing Abdullah is narrated by its director, Ben Forsyth, and it opens on a question that belongs to a whole generation of men: in a world overflowing with answers, with morning routines and ideologies and advice from everyone, how do you know who you actually are? Ben felt that confusion most sharply when he stopped fighting. Mixed martial arts had given him direction, structure and a way of measuring himself, and becoming a
European champion was his “big thing.” When he retired, nothing replaced it. The search for what might come next led him, eventually, to a camera, and to Abdullah Zeinab. Abdullah is an undefeated ultra-endurance cyclist from Adelaide who has won some of the hardest races on earth, and whom almost no one has heard of. Online he is magnetic: disciplined, funny, certain, full of philosophy about mindset and suffering. When Ben first films him in the Adelaide hills, hanging out of a car window to catch him climbing Norton Summit, he is plainly a fish out of water, and Abdullah’s warmth and showmanship only deepen the pull. Here, Ben thinks, is a man who has the answers, who moves through the world with a lightness Ben has never felt in himself. Abdullah says he wants to do one last race, the Transcontinental – the Tour de France of ultra-endurance cycling and asks Ben to document it. It does not take much convincing.
As Ben gets close, the two men’s lives begin to rhyme. Both were eleven when their fathers left. Abdullah, in Adelaide, turned abandonment into relentless physical transformation, remaking an overweight boy into a muscular young man and building a devoted YouTube following along the way. Ben, in a Dublin council estate, watched alcohol and violence drive his father out, and turned to martial arts to become “what I thought men would respect and women would desire.” Chasing Abdullah is a feature documentary following former European MMA champion Ben Forsyth as he chases ultra-endurance cyclist Abdullah Zeinab across the Transcontinental Race, a self-supported 4,000-kilometre race from France to Türkiye, run on public roads with no crew, no fixed route and no assistance of any kind. Riders navigate alone, sleep in fields and petrol stations, and make every decision themselves. There is no prize money. Finishing is the point.
It is not a conventional sports documentary. Ben is rarely alongside Abdullah; for most of the race his subject is a blinking GPS dot, a figure glimpsed at a checkpoint, a voice on the phone at 3am. What Ben is chasing is not just a man but an understanding of what drives someone to push this hard, what it costs and what it means. That question turns out to be his own. The film begins as a portrait of one man and becomes a quiet inquiry
into both of them: a film about identity, and whether the things we pursue ever lead where we think they will.
Abdullah’s path ran from bricklayer and Uber delivery rider to filmmaker on the 2017 Indian Pacific Wheel Race, where he grew close to the sport’s revered founder, Mike Hall. Mike was struck by a car and killed during the filming. The following year Abdullah returned, not as a filmmaker but as a rider, and won. The Transcontinental, the race at the centre of this film, was Mike Hall’s race too. The rules of the race become the architecture of the film. Riders are alone and unsupported, carrying everything they need and sleeping at the roadside. Ben and his cinematographer may reach Abdullah at only five checkpoints, and may not help him in any way, or he risks disqualification. At the start line in Roubaix, amid three hundred riders and torchlight, Ben asks one last question: if he could send a message to himself at the peak of his suffering, what would it be? “I would tell myself to go now,” Abdullah answers, “as this is the last time I’m doing this.” Then the horn sounds and he is gone. In between checkpoints, Ben and his cinematographer chase a blinking dot across the continent, through flat tyres, missed
campsites and sleepless nights, never quite sure how far ahead he is. We learn what the obsession costs: months spent pre-planning every kilometre, a diet of thousands of
calories and roadside fast food, a body so unwilling to stop that he will soil himself on the bike rather than lose a minute. At the checkpoints Abdullah is at first stoic, almost cold, then slowly more open, shivering, hollow-cheeked, talking to himself, a Palestinian flag stitched into his jersey because, he says, it makes him feel he cannot complain. Ben, who fought in a cage for a living, begins to find the suffering hard to watch. “I’m suddenly not
enjoying filming this race anymore,” he admits. Then the dot goes offline. No one knows where Abdullah is. In Istanbul his mother and his partner watch a grey, motionless dot on the map, and the memory of Mike Hall fills the
silence. Ben lets his mind run to the worst: is he here to witness Abdullah’s demise the way Abdullah once witnessed Mike’s? Abdullah surfaces, battered, his bike held together with luck, and Ben and George trail him in the van for the final stretch. Somewhere on that road, over a service-station baguette, he says the thing Ben has been chasing: “It’s just not really there anymore. Once that feeling dies, there’s no reason to go on.” Ben
realises he is talking to a version of himself. “He’s no different to me,” he reflects. “I can’t find the answers through him, but by chasing him, I feel closer to finding them in myself.” A kilometre from the finish, in third place, Abdullah takes a wrong turn and misses part of the mandatory route. The organisers tell him to go back and ride it again. He does, and as he returns another rider sweeps past and takes the podium place. He finishes fourth,
and seems strangely unbothered, grateful just to have made it in one piece. The “last race” was never really about the race.
An honest coda complicates the ending. Abdullah enters the same race the following year and pulls out after ten hours. By then he has ended his relationship, given up the dream of a family, and chased the discipline to the edge of disassociation, with insomnia and panic attacks in the weeks before the start. He had known for a while that it was no longer for him, but he had to go all the way there to be sure. When he hangs up the bike for good, the weight lifts. The film leaves him close to where he began, back delivering food, lighter and freer, turning to Ben to ask, simply: “Alright, what’ll we do now?”
