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Despite all of the amazing footage of this year’s Paris Olympics surfers – taking place in Tahiti, half a world away – the stand-out moment is a still image. It makes the photographer in me deeply happy, filled with nachas (the Yiddish word for heartwarming joy).
When Brazilian surfer Gabriel Medina broke out from under those massive curling waves – known as a “kick out” – he gestured number one by pointing his index finger up and appeared to be standing in midair. His surfboard is helpfully and synchronistically standing upright two metres to his left.
It was a moment in a million that day among a two-week blitz of sporting achievements. Time has already called it “the defining image of triumph of the 2024 Summer Games”.
The man who took the pictures is the now-famous AFP photographer Jerome Brouillet, who moved to Teahupo’o a decade ago, so he knows the waves. He was in the primary media boat, on the side where the surfers compete and where they “kick out” from the barrel wave. (I think it’s called a barrel wave.)
“Every photographer is waiting for that. You know Gabriel Medina, especially at Teahupo’o will kick off and do something,” Brouillet told AFP, for whom he works. He also posted it to his Instagram.
“You know something is going to happen. The only tricky moment is where he is going to kick out? Because I’m blind!” he said, meaning the surfer is under the wave and can’t be seen. “Sometimes he makes an acrobatic gesture and this time he did that and so I pushed the button.”
What impressed me, in this age of high-burst cameras that can shoot 20 images per second, is that Brouillet was mindful – the word of the decade, really – about capturing his image.
“When I’m shooting at Teahupo’o I don’t shoot in such a high-burst mode, because at the end of the day, if you push too hard on the button you come back with 5,000 shots in a day, and I don’t like that!” he said. “I got four shots of him out of the water and one of the four shots was this photo.”
That alone is a learning experience, worthy of a column. Just because technology allows you to do something, it doesn’t mean it’s a bad or a good thing – like capturing 5,000 images but having to go through all of them for several hours.
Brouillet’s careful planning reminded me of that equally legendary photograph from the Barcelona Olympics, of 13-year-old Chinese diver Fu Mingxia winning gold – against the background of the beautiful city.
The photographer’s story for that image is equally interesting. UK-based Bob Martin convinced Time about the shot and got them to fund a trip to Barcelona, where scaffolding had to be built and a diver found.
“I called the RFEN (Royal Spanish Swimming Federation), but they said it was too cold for a Spanish diver to dive in the pool in the spring,” the photographer laughed. “So the only diver I could get who was willing to do it was an English girl called Tracey Miles.”
Miles, clearly less afraid of the cold, would become famous and appear on Time’s cover, her back arching over Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in the background. “It was all made possible by Martin’s vision and foresight. It was the Englishman who first saw the shot, planned it, took it, got it on the front cover of Time Magazine’s Barcelona 1992 Olympic Games preview, and set the template for the world to follow,” says the Olympics.
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The images of all the divers at that venue are epic – due in no small part to Gaudi’s many masterpieces in the background. “Not only did the image of Miles, flying over the expanse of Barcelona, grace newsstands across the world and subsequently feature in numerous international exhibitions, but it also inspired an industry and fuelled a career.”
Indeed, says Martin, “It set me up for my career, the fact that I took this picture before anybody else. Loads of people considered it a really iconic picture and that helped kick-start my career. It was my first really big international picture.”
“All the way during the Games people were coming up to me saying, ‘I saw your picture in Time Magazine, and I have been and done it,’” Martin said. “And I still had people a few years ago, when the world swimming championships went back there in 2013, coming up to me and saying, ‘I took your picture.’ That is quite touching for me, as an old git of a photographer.”
But Barcelona appears to have been eclipsed.
“This may well be the greatest sports photo of all time,” wrote News.com.au – which, being Australian, might fuel theories that the surfing-living nation may be a bit biased.
