What a wonderful world

I spent my Labor Day covering the 2011 Avia Austin Triathlon for the Statesman.  (This is the action shot post.)

I got a phone call on Sunday night around 7 p.m. – about 12 hours before the race began – from the Statesman photo editor, Jay.  He wanted to free up some staffers to cover the large fires happening around the Austin area, and he needed someone to shoot the triathlon.  I accepted the assignment and went to work researching the event.  With large races like these, it usually takes some prep to figure out where to be and when, and also figure out how to gain access to those places.

After studying race maps, looking at a few photos from previous years and trying to contact every phone number and email address on the race’s web site, I called Brom, the reporter who would be writing about the race.  He helped out quite a bit and I felt confident enough to go to bed early and set my alarm for 5 a.m.

Monday morning I got up, packed my gear and got on the road toward Auditorium Shores.  I parked a few blocks away and had plenty of time to get the lay of the land in the dark before the race began.

First up was swimming.  I found the starting dock and found another dock close by where I could shoot.  I wandered around a bit to find some feature shots, but didn’t get anything I was proud of.  Just as it was starting to get lighter, I found a good spot on the dock and the race began.

I was assigned to shoot the leaders of the open Olypmic distance category, so I did my best to comply with that.

That’s Balazs Csoke of Zurich, who took an early lead over the home-town favorite, James Bonney.  I got this shot from the dock upriver from the starting line, but I wasn’t happy with the angle, so I moved to the starting dock, knowing I’d have to be very careful not to fall in the water as the athletes took their starting positions.

This was more like the shot I was hoping to get, but this was taken during the third wave, the men’s 30-34 age division.

I took a few shots from the starting dock, then headed over to where the swimmers would exit Town Lake and transition to the cycling portion of the race.  Here are a few shots as they made it to shore.

I shot as the first four or five athletes came out of the water, then headed up to the 1st St. bridge to watch the cycling portion.  Brom and I stood across the street from Austin City Hall on Cesar Chavez St.  It was only a minute or two before the first men’s lap was complete and they were headed in to lap 2.

The women’s leader, D’Ann Arthur of Dallas had a pretty good lead at that point and the men’s race was a battle between Csoke and Bonney.

Because of the layout of the race, the athletes crossed the same path more than once.  And since there were many people starting at all different times, it became very confusing keeping track of the leaders and who had passed once and who had passed twice.

After a while we went back down to Riverside Dr. to watch the final leg of the race, the running portion.  This was where things got interesting.  We saw Csoke running toward us on his first lap and he looked like this:

We learned quickly that he and a few other athletes lost track of the course and ended up accidentally cutting a corner, disqualifying at least three of the men’s leaders.  Later Csoke said he stopped and asked someone which direction to go, but no one knew.

After a few minutes more athletes came and the spectators were buzzing about what happened and how many people made which mistake.  Bonney was now officially in the lead, but three men were ahead of him, still competing.

The women’s race continued without controversy.

After the leaders started their second lap, I made my way to the finish line.  At that point the male athletes in the race knew what was happening, but they continued to the end.

Csoke came across the tape first with a lot of questions.  I got this shot as he was trying to explain what happened:

Bonney was the official winner of the men’s race and Arthur came through first for the women.

After the disqualified men all finished the race, the discussion began about what happened.  All of the men were friendly and gracious, no one was terribly angry or overly emotional.  They were very supportive of each other, but did want to know what went wrong.

I snapped a couple of shots in the confusion.

In the top shot Bonney describes a point in the race when a police officer stopped him from running off course in to traffic.  In the bottom shot, the disqualified athletes talk to race director Dan Carroll (in the red).

Unfortunately for those athletes, the preliminary race results became official.  But, as I said before, it seemed like there were no hard feelings and everyone still got along at the end of the race.  It was a great display of good sportsmanship.

Click here to read Brom Hoban’s story.

In my next post, I’ll show you some feature shots I got during the day.