The European Athletics Championships 2018
A unique atmosphere is created around a city when it hosts a major sporting event. I experienced it in 2012 when the Olympics were held in London, so I'd long been looking forward to Berlin hosting the European Athletics Championships in August 2018.
For one festive week, the city was on its best behaviour to welcome visiting fans, athletes and delegates from all over Europe. Grumpy Berliners temporarily transformed into joyous sports fans, city squares became party zones, we basked in a stretch of glorious summer weather and even the trains were running on time.
The Olympiastadion, with its famous blue track, was of course designed with athletics in mind. Berlin’s top football club Hertha BSC are the main tenants today, but they rarely manage to fill it and, even when the German national team are playing there, the running track separating the crowd from the action is blamed for dampening the atmosphere somewhat.
Watching athletics in a purpose built stadium turned out to be a completely different experience. Unlike most football matches, once the action started, excitement levels in the crowd just kept rising all night, driven by a strong German team which included all of their defending European Champions and a slew of gold medal hopes.
The men’s javelin and Robert Harding’s final appearance at a championship event were expected to be among the week’s highlights. Germany boasts the World and Olympic champions in the javelin, neither of whom currently hold the title of German champion. There a was a real chance of Johannes Vetter, Thomas Röhler and Andreas Hoffman sweeping the medals.
It almost happened but didn’t quite come together for Vetter on the night and he missed out. Thomas Röhler and Andreas Hoffman took gold and silver and were still doing their lap of honour in front of a rapturous crowd when all the other events had been wrapped up.
The previous night was a disappointment for Robert Harding, whose vest remained in one piece after he failed to win a medal in the discus. But that didn’t stop an emotional, farewell lap of honour and an extended standing ovation for Germany’s biggest athletics legend of recent years.
To succeed him, Germany gained a new ‘King Of Athletics’, the title traditionally given to the winner of the decathlon. The look of sheer determination on Arthur Abele’s face as he forced his exhausted body around the last bend of the 1500m and the emotions he showed when he was confirmed the winner - breaking down into tears on his lap of honour, ensured the home crowd had a new hero.
As he said he would be beforehand, high jumper Mateusz Przybylko proved to be one of the championship's top showmen. He cleared every height at his first attempt, celebrating each success with ever increasing fervor, until he tried to set a new German record of 2.38m. That was a leap too lofty on this occasion, but by then he was already European Champion and the pre-event favourites could only offer their congratulations.
Germany has its track stars as well. In last year’s World Championships, Gesa Felicitas Krause was deprived of a medal when another runner fell and collided with her. She sublimely retained her European 3000m Steeplechase title, looking comfortable on the shoulders of the leaders for most of the race, before displaying her dominance and taking them out in the last 200m.
However, all those standout performances were eclipsed by another returning crowd favourite. Nine years after Berlin hosted the World Championships, the clumsy mascot Berlino came out of hibernation to once again grace the stadium, encouraging the crowd, hugging the athletes, getting in the official's way and when he felt like it, kicking back on an inflatable unicorn in the steeplechase water jump. Pity no-one brought him a cocktail.
There didn’t seem to be the usual restriction on spectators bringing at least a moderately sized DSLR into the stadium, so I decided to risk it with some of my older gear: a battered Nikon D3200 I usually use for travel, paired with a budget telephoto lens - inexpensive items I'm planning to replace so I'd get over never seeing them again if they were confiscated. But the stewards were fine with that so, sitting just a couple of rows back from the track, I had a good chance of bagging some reasonable photos.
I think live action sports is one of photography's toughest genres; just to get a hold on, let alone to master. I predominantly shoot cityscapes so my subjects tend to be accommodatingly stationary. Capturing a sharp shot of a 100m runner blasting down the track at speeds of 30-40 km/h requires some extra skills.
The basics I know. Use continuous-tracking autofocus to keep a moving subject in focus and set a fast shutter speed to freeze the motion. Faster shutter speeds mean lower exposures so widen the aperture as much as possible which will also provide a shallow depth of field to help blur out distracting background elements. Raise the ISO if exposure levels are still too low. Engage continuous burst shooting mode so that holding down the shutter release will rapidly fire off multiple frames, one of which will hopefully be a winner.
Putting all that into practice is easier said than done, especially if you're using anything less than top grade, professional gear. If you watch sports on TV you’ve probably seen the pro photographers. They’re the guys sitting round the edge of the action, cradling enormous telephoto lenses a baby could sleep in, or comically chasing after the competitors with 3 or 4 cameras swinging from their shoulders, desperately trying to get their shot.
They look like an annoyance but they’re the reason you see such amazing live action photographs when you read about the event. Because the most important skill a sports photographer should have is an instinct for anticipating the crucial moment: that split second peak of the action or the exuberant expression on an athlete's face the moment they realise they’re the champion.
These guys are under tremendous pressure to deliver top quality images quickly to their agencies, so it must be a relief to nail a banker. I do wonder though, how many shots a pro takes during an event to get one that’s worth publishing. They’ve certainly got it much easier than their predecessors did before the digital age. When several rolls of film had to be developed before you could be sure you'd captured something special, the margin for error was significantly smaller.
