Look out! These videos highlight the occupational risk of sports photography
posted Friday, December 2, 2016 at 2:00 PM EST
Sports photography is about capturing the iconic sports moments that sometimes transcend the field of play altogether. Shooting the timeless images can come with more physical wear and tear than the soreness that accompanies lugging a massive exotic telephoto lens around for hours. Have you ever seen a photographer on a National Football League sideline get steamrolled by a 250-pound player? If you’ve watched a lot of football, you surely have. The job of sports photographer comes with inherent risk.
Digital Trends has put together a list of some of the most painful accidents that have struck down photojournalists at some of the world’s biggest sporting events. We are going to look at a few of them here.
We start with a college football game. This poor photographer – and his poor gear! – got run over while photographing the 2014 Cotton Bowl. He is smiling at the end of the clip, which means he probably was at least generally unharmed.
While it’s not farfetched to think that professional golfers occasionally have reason to be upset with photographers who fire off bursts during their swings, this unfortunate photographer was victim to a bad swing. Sergio Garcia shanks an iron shot and plunks a photographer who was set up well off the fairway.
It isn’t always just the photographer who suffers injury as we can see in the video below. Cyclist Lizzie Armistead was celebrating a victory when she collided with a group of photographers who were in the road. The initial crash caused a massive pileup and Armistead was hospitalized for sustained injuries.
Here we see another incident between a racer and a photographer, although this time only the photographer was injured. Famously emotionless Finnish Formula 1 driver Kimi Räikkönen is known as “The Ice Man” but he was anything but cool and composed following a pre-race run-in with a photographer at Silverstone in England. It isn’t always the sporting event that poses a risk to photographers, but sometimes the athletes themselves. Granted, this photojournalist was allegedly in Räikkönen’s personal space.
To see the rest of the videos showcasing the dangers of sports photography, head on over to Digital Trends.
(Seen via Digital Trends)