IF James Erskine should ever feel the need to go on Mastermind, his specialist subject could be the sounds of bikes.

On wet roads and dry, mountain passes and city streets, Bianchi versus Trek, the British director recorded them all to make his new documentary, Pantani: The Accidental Death Of A Cyclist.

The film examines the sporting triumphs and ultimate tragedy of the Giro d'Italia and Tour de France winner Marco Pantani, who was found dead in a hotel room in 2004, aged 34.

Although a controversial figure when he was alive, the years have only added lustre to the legend of Il Pirata, "the pirate". So it was with some trepidation that Erskine, a 40-year-old Londoner, took his film to Pantani's native Italy before its UK opening next week.

Wherever the former BBC Scotland staffer went he was asked why an Englishman was making a film about an Italian sporting hero. "In that Italian way they were both indignant and flattered by this," he says. "But there was a really positive and strong reaction."

What won many over was the obvious care taken to get things right, which extended to recording all those bike sounds so that the races were not just a visual treat but an audio one as well. "We put a huge amount of care and effort in to make a piece of cinema," says Erskine.

As the director of The Battle Of The Sexes (the story of Billie Jean King's famous match against Bobby Riggs that ushered in equal pay for women in tennis), One Night In Turin (the tale of England at Italia 90, Gazza's tears and all) and the cricketing documentary From The Ashes, Erskine has been at the crest of a wave of sports documentaries that reached a new height with Senna in 2010. The story of the Formula One racing legend Ayrton Senna, directed by Asif Kapadia, won a shelf of awards, including two Baftas, but most importantly it took sports documentary into the multiplex. Even those who were not hard core F1 fans could thrill to a story told as grippingly as any Hollywood drama.

Victoria Gregory, Erskine's long-time producer partner, was also a producer on Senna.

While Senna was a breakthrough, the real starting point for Erskine was When We Were Kings, Leon Gast's 1996, Oscar-winning look at the "Rumble in the Jungle" between Ali and Foreman in Zaire. "It was a film that was made through a real struggle and over a long period of time." As such, it struck the template for the sort of sports documentaries he wanted to make, ones that had great characters and which said something about the times in which they lived.

He had long been thinking of making a film about professional cycling because of the intense physical and psychological pressures involved. A researcher brought him the story of Pantani, as told in Matt Rendell's book, The Death Of Marco Pantani. Erskine had found his subject. "For me it was Raging Bull on a bike, all the contradictions between personality and situation that arise in sport."

On the wish list of interviewees was Sir Bradley Wiggins, the Tour de France winner and Olympic champion, but Erskine was not hopeful he would land him. As it turned out, Wiggins had ridden with Pantani and was only too keen to pay tribute.

Although the archive footage shows the blood, sweat and bruises involved in top-flight professional cycling, having Wiggins testify to the experience was something special, says Erskine. "He provided a really good perspective, of both a fan and a peer." As Wiggins says in the film, the Tour de France is the only sporting event in the world that is so long you need a haircut half way through.

Pantani had many significant victories in his career, and Erskine had to find a way of documenting those at the same time as looking at the sportsman's personal struggles. The crew filmed in the mountains where Pantani made his legendary climbs, and to keep the pace pumping from one race to the next, each sporting battle was edited in a different way. The section on Lance Armstrong and Pantani, for example, shifts back and forth from footage of the Mont Ventoux race to photo close-ups of their faces to emphasis what a personal battle this was.

Sporting documentaries work best, reckons Erskine, when they unfold like a drama. The best subjects are those at the top of their game, not just because there will be plenty of archive available, but because the viewer senses that they are watching something, and someone, special.

"That was what interested me about Gascoigne," he says, recalling One Night In Turin. "You couldn't get an actor to play Paul Gascoigne as a footballer. We watch a lot of sport all the time and we instinctively know whether something is right or not. These people are doing something that, whatever their personality issues, is something you or I could not do, and we will never meet anyone who can do that.

"It is not like being a writer or an actor or a director, where a lot of it is about being in the right place at the right time. That is not the case in top-class sport. It is a very tight pyramid. Talent and energy are at the heart of those achievements."

Having started his career directing the likes of Waterloo Road and Holby City, Erskine finds himself back in drama with two features out later this year: Shooting For Socrates, with Scots actor John Hannah playing Billy Bingham, the Northern Ireland manager taking his national team to the World Cup, and The White Room, a thriller.

Whatever stories he tells in future, they will have to go a long way to beat the dramas he has found in sport, and Pantani's life in particular. "What sort of greater human canvas can you have than a tragedy?"

Filmhouse, Edinburgh, May 16-22.