It feels like years ago I was spending my afternoons at home endlessly moving the marker along Google street view, looking at kilometres of French D roads in the hope of finding locations worth shooting on all 21 stages of this Tour de France.
Sitting on the train home, I’m taking the time to put together a gallery of my favourite photos from this years race, shooting mountains, French countryside and traditional villages across the three weeks. Here’s a handful of my photographs and why I like them, and bear with whatever these words turn into – all of me would rather be asleep right now.
Let’s do this in chronological order then, makes sense. The team time trial in Barcelona, the much-anticipated Grand Depart. I shot down the bottom of the Montjuïc climb, near the National Art Museum. Sunlight streamed in, harshly as it always does in Spain. I didn’t love it here but it gave me freedom, the space to move around, and in a time trial, that’s all you could ever ask for, I’m not sitting in one spot on stage one.
For a change, I think my favourite photo was of the podium ceremony, seeing the team celebrate together. We photographers do love emotion and it was there in spades on the first podium.
You couldn’t get enough of it the next day. After riding up the Costa Brava, and surviving the orange smoke flares on the second lap of the Montjuïc circuits, Isaac del Toro and Tadej Pogacar crossed the line together in celebration. I’ve never photographed a happier Tadej, it was nice to see the joy his teammate winning brought him. It feels like a lifetime ago now, but watching through the viewfinder as he lifted him into the air hand raised against the sky, these are the photos we could only ever wish for.
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