Rohit Brijnath: The joy of finding a favourite sporting photograph

Click. Click. Click.

Armand Duplantis levitating at six metres. Cyclists, all Cassius lean, cutting through a tight crowd. Artistic swimmers upside down like liquid angels. The cold concentration of a wushu exponent.

These are the athletes you saw all year but not quite like this. This is sport in another light and from another vantage point. This is split-second stories composed on catwalks, helicopters or lying down in the mud. This is the big picture of a lonely car amid the dunes of the Dakar Rally and the small picture of a boxer’s fist mashing a mouth.

This is my December delight, flicking through the year’s best sports pictures. Getty Images, Reuters, AP. Genius frozen, action caught, history framed.

How to pick one?

Writers get swollen bylines, photographers tiny ones in modest point size after a caption. Do people remember their names? But the sportswriter knows the photographer because we are an old, odd couple. One carries a notepad, the other hefts at least two camera bodies, four lenses, flash unit, memory cards, extra batteries and a wireless transceiver for a remote camera.

One sits in the stand, coffee nearby, hammering at a laptop; the other, in the field, sets up in the rain/heat/cold. Both are searching for angles. The writer researches the athlete’s past, the photographer the background. The former can miss the moment and rely on a replay. The latter has no second chance.

It’s why I pick Emilee Chinn’s picture of the fallen 3,000m steeplechaser Geordie Beamish as my favourite.

In September 2025 at the world athletics championships, tangled up in a barrier, with a lap to go in the heats, Beamish falls. A runner hurdles him. Chinn clicks.

This is sport, always it’s in the timing.

In a still image Chinn catches the thrilling motion of sport. It is a portrait of chaos, a painting of urgent flight. The composition is intriguing, so many flying limbs yet only one face visible. The fall is unlucky yet Beamish is lucky: As a runner hurdles him, his shoe perhaps lands only a glancing blow on Beamish’s face but the spikes miss.

Little things are striking. The sense of a human run over. The unpredictable explosion of competition. The idea of struggle. A glimpse into the insides of the dense, elbowing running pack. The varied colour of the contestants’ legs which reminds us the whole world runs.

I look at the picture on my laptop for a while. It deserves more than a phone as a canvas. In an age now vanished, when live sport on TV was a luxury, the photograph had muscle. Our artists then included Tommy Hindley, Patrick Eagar, Bob Martin, Adrian Murrell, Walter Iooss and Nikhilda (the legendary Nikhil Bhattacharya) from Anandabazar Patrika.

In the ABP library, standing upright on a shelf, was a thick volume of Neil Leifer’s work. It qualified as treasure and Sportsworld magazine writers—three of whom would subsequently buy copies of the book—went through it as carefully as a critic walking through a gallery at the Louvre.

Leifer, 82, is a genius, and you can buy a signed 20x24 copy of his favourite photograph for $20,680. It’s an aerial view from 1966 of Muhammad Ali with his arms up after knocking out a spreadeagled Cleveland Williams and it’s all planning, imagination and luck.

The camera was high on a light fixture and Leifer told The Guardian in 2020: “I gambled that there would be a good knockout. Sometimes a fighter crumples on their chest or falls into the ropes, but Williams landed flat on his back.”

I don’t know what position Chinn was in for Beamish, but photographers, whether for action pictures or stylised portraits, will go anywhere for a picture. Lean out of boats or hike high into the rafters of an arena. Bandeep Singh, India Today’s gifted photographer, once found a Food Corporation of India godown to shoot kabaddi players. Iooss hired a cherry picker to photograph Michael Jordan from above for his photo The Blue Dunk. My colleague Kevin Lim at The Straits Times has swum underneath swimmers with his camera.

I enjoy watching photographers at work, how early they come to stadiums, wandering around like surveyors, reading the conditions, playing with shadow, considering risk, patient, enduring, focused, every ball of a Test-match day and every point of a Grand Slam final.

In an interview on YouTube, the great Bob Martin speaks of taking years to get planning and permission to stand on a catwalk above the pool at the 2004 Paralympics. A swimmer arrived, shed his large prosthetic legs and dived in. The visual was dramatic, but Martin was at the other end of the catwalk.

Then, fortune.

It was a false start, the swimmers regrouped, Martin rushed to find his position, and the result was an extraordinary depiction of unstoppable will. Sport belongs to everyone. Martin won the World Press Photo Award in 2005 and told his interviewer: “I almost missed the best picture I have ever taken.”

The Martin photo hangs in my memory, next to the black and white shot of a victorious Björn Borg on his knees at Wimbledon 1980, and John Donegan’s portrait of exhausted Australian firemen in the country, playing cricket among the trees.

The charming Beamish’s story ended perfectly. He fell, rose, ran, qualified for the steeplechase final where he out-sprinted the legendary Soufiane El Bakkali, who has two Olympic golds and two world championship golds, to win.

Chinn’s picture, titled Perseverance, was one of the three finalists for the 2025 World Athletics Photograph of the Year. It didn’t win eventually but while researching it I was led to another wonderful image. It is a video of Beamish at the mixed zone after his heat, leaning over a metal railing and looking at a camera viewfinder.

A photographer is showing him pictures of his fall.

Rohit Brijnath (@rohitdbrijnath) is an assistant sports editor at The Straits Times, Singapore, and co-author of Abhinav Bindra’s book A Shot At History: My Obsessive Journey To Olympic Gold.