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.
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.”
