Showing posts with label Usain Bolt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Usain Bolt. Show all posts

Friday, January 16, 2009

Deck Whittington

Anything To Declare (Apart From That Cycle?)

Photographs copyright: DAVID McMAHON


On the face of it, I guess I'm probably built like a sprinter. I'm tall and broad-shouldered and I have a stride like I'm wearing ten-league boots. But that's where it ends, trust me. I'm not a sprinter. Not now. Not ever. I was very handy at a variety of sports, but sprinting was never my forte.

The track and field gene, if it is indeed present in my DNA, is a recessive gene. A highly recessive gene.

Usain Bolt I ain't. Unlike Mister Bolt, I am not a dual Olympic sprint champion.

So when I was approaching one end of Princes Bridge and I saw this tourist cruise vessel heading towards the south bank of the river, I knew I had about three seconds, maybe four seconds, tops, to race across the bridge and be able to shoot directly downwards as the funnel passed underneath.

Picture this. Crowded bridge. Camera around my neck. And I've got four seconds to sprint thirty metres or more, zig-zagging through the pedestrians? Not gonna happen.

Not. Going. To. Happen.

But I got close, as you can see from the first photograph.

Then, as I shot the first image, I saw what you can see in the frame as well. The seat of a bicycle, with its clone-like shadow in the bright afternoon sun.

So of course I had to work the lens frantically to get a wider view, just as the vessel passed beneath the bridge.


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Friday, January 02, 2009

Verse And Worse

Random Wit, Errant Rhyme. Not A Literary Crime

Who could run faster than the great Usain Bolt?
No man alive, no, not even a colt
He's unmatched in pace while to glory he sprints
As the rest of us hobble and struggle with splints