A couple of weeks ago John Mullineaux of ukcyclesport did an interview with me and he asked me to tell interesting stories about my favourite photos from the book and one story came after another, so I decided to write a series blogposts about photos from the book – either because the photo itself is interesting, or because the way it was taken interesting or because there was a funny story behind the photo.
I decided the first photo to be a photo of Zdenek Stbyar at the second Superprestige race at Zonhoven. It was the first lap of the elite men’s race and the obvious place to be at that part of the race was the hellish sand pit, not much after the start.
During the previous races of the day I managed to find a great spot but as it often happens, a great spot that was fully accessible during the nieuwlingen’s race, come the elite men’s race and you can forget about being able to get anywhere near there. I didn’t really have a plan B, so I started to walk towards the next spot I had planned out during the recce.
The race then started and I was stuck behind a big group of people and that’s when I found this angle. It was a bit tricky because I could only use the 70-200 lens and a few heads were in the frame no matter how I tried to move around but being almost 200 cm tall helped a lot this time.
Zdenek Stbyar, in his sparkly rainbow jersey, arrived first at the top of the slope and even though I didn’t catch the crash-fest at the bottom of the hill, I was quite happy with this shot as it managed to capture the immense anticipation of the crowd as the riders entered the sand pit to start the trickiest descent of the season.
The photo can be found on page 34 of the Cyclocross 2011/2012 Book.
