AFP photographer Jerome Brouillet knew to expect fireworks when he saw Brazilian Olympic surfer Gabriel Medina paddle into one of the day’s biggest waves at one of the world’s heaviest surf breaks.
What he didn’t know was that his picture of Medina kicking out of the wave after a ride that earned a record Olympics score in Tahiti would become a global sensation, and likely a defining image of the sport and the Games.
Brouillet was on a boat in the channel — an area of deeper, calmer water to the side of the wave but without a clear line of sight of the initial action.
But it was exactly where he wanted to be.
Brouillet was in a prime spot waiting for Medina to “kick out” — exit the wave face at the end of his run.
“Every photographer is waiting for that. You know Gabriel Medina, especially at Teahupo’o will kick off and do something,” said Brouillet.
“You know something is going to happen. The only tricky moment is where he is going to kick out? Because I’m blind!
“Sometimes he makes an acrobatic gesture and this time he did that and so I pushed the button.”
Brouillet caught Medina soaring ramrod-straight above the waves pointing one finger in the sky, his surfboard pointing skyward at his side.
“I think that when he was in the tube he knew that he was in one of the biggest waves of the day. He is jumping out of the water like ‘man, I think this is a 10’,” said Brouillet.
Brouillet suspected he had also captured something special but wasn’t 100 percent sure.
“When I’m shooting at Teahupo’o I don’t shoot in such a high burst mode, because at the end of the day, if you push too hard on the button you come back with 5,000 shots in a day, and I don’t like that!”
“I got four shots of him out of the water and one of the four shots was this photo.”
The picture has been used by scores of publications around the world and shared or liked millions of times online.
“This may well be the greatest sports photo of all time,” Australian media conglomerate News.com.au posted on its Facebook page.
TIME magazine described it as “the defining image of triumph of the 2024 Summer Games”.
Medina posted the image on his own Instagram account, quickly attracting more than 2.4 million likes.
Despite the accolades, Brouillet said celebrations would have to wait because he still had the rest of the competition to shoot.
“I’m sleeping at a friend’s house near Teahupo’o and we’ll have a quiet one because if tomorrow the event is on, I have to wake up at five in the morning!”
