Time magazine called Medina kick-out shot “the
defining image of triumph of the 2024 Summer Games.”
You’re well aware, I’m sure, of the hysteria surrounding
a photo of a Gabriel Medina flying kick-out doing the
rounds.
Time magazine called the photograph
by Marseilles-born Jerome Brouillet who now lives in Tahiti and was
shooting for Agence France-Presse the “defining image of triumph of
the 2024 Summer Games.”
Brouillet suspects he took four frames of Medina in the air
and knew right away that this shot was the best, but he says it was
a “team effort,” crediting the global response to the image to his
editor at the AFP who recognized the now-viral frame as
extraordinary and posted it immediately for the world to
see.
When Gabriel Medina kicked it live on his Instagram account, the
photographer uncredited for whatever reason and Medina uncredited
on AFP’s post, it generated 137,691 comments.
What was left unsaid, howevs, was the ordinariness of the
moment, even if the symmetry of Medina and his board is lightly
interesting.
“Ok, a lifetime’s worth of kickout shots in a single day. Now
please make it stop,” wrote the former photo editor of now-defunct
Surfing magazine, Jimmy Wilson.
And, in a frank interview that just appeared on the Instagram
account Duke_Surf, the French-Australian photographer Tim Mckenna,
whose photos of Teahupoo hang in galleries around the world, said,
man, it just wasn’t…that…good.
“It’s typical mainstream media that love kick-outs, you know,
the worst manoeuvre in surfing,” says McKenna.
“Unfortunately the most famous photo of the Olympics is going to
be a photo where you don’t even see the Teahupoo wave. And for me,
it’s all about the wave, it’s the show, the star is the wave, it’s
Teahupoo. And this photo you don’t really see it, you see the
arena. It’s great for the city, for the Olympics, and for Toronto,
but there’s better photos out there.”
McKenna says, yeah, it is a nice enough photo “but it doesn’t
represent to me the beautiful of Teahupoo and the beauty of the
event.”
Interestingly, McKenna says AFP initially had exclusive rights
to shoot wide-angle water during the event.
“The first day, they had a guy swimming under the wave, inside
the wave. Like, I had never seen that in 30 years of taking photos
of an event. They managed to get an exclusivity with the Olympics
about that. And it didn’t last long. Obviously, the judges and
people said, this is not possible. You can’t have a photographer in
the field of play. It’s like having a photographer in the middle of
a soccer field, or inside a boxing ring.”
McKenna points out the irony of AFP getting their most
successful shot from their stringer in the channel.
“It’s funny because Jérôme Bouillé, managed to get a photo viral
by being on the boat and getting a shot so they didn’t need to do
that. I think it was pretty disrespectful for the surfers. You
know, surfers don’t want to see a photographer in the wave, under
the wave.”
