Sports Photography by George Ross

On February 8th, 2009, I was fortunate to be covering the Reebok Boston indoor games for New England Runner magazine and while there were many great races at this meet, including a spectacular high school boys 1 miler, the big race  of the day was the Women’s 5K. The Bejing Olympic bronze medalist   and Massachusetts local, Shalane Flanagan (breaking the American 10K record in the process with 30:22:22) was tipped to break the American 5K indoor record. It was a small but loaded field with Jen Rhines, Mary Cullen (who set a new Irish 5K record during the race ) and Sentayehu Ejigu of Ethiopia who ran a blistering 14:35 in 2004.  My task was to shoot the ‘hometown girl’ and, of course, the race action.

I was positioned on the 2nd turn and paid little heed to the finish line because it was across the other side of the track, and the pole vault was active during the the race.

For lenses I used the 70-200mm L series IS f/2.8 and for my wide angle and panning work I used the 24-70mm L series IS f/2.8 mounted on to a pair of Canon EOS 40D’s. The lighting wasn’t great but I was able to operate at ISO1600.

The race was tremendous with Ejigu letting Flanagan do all the work until the last lap,. when it turned in to one of the greatest finishes of all time and Ejigu and Flanagan were neck and neck for the last 200m. When I took my last shots with 150m to go I sensed what was about to happen and stayed with the race. Now, I was using a 200 which was too short to shoot across the track but with the 1.63 crop factor of the 40D it just about gave me reach. I just kept firing, following Shalane, and kept firing producing the shots in the collage below.In this collage of 6 frames, you can see Ejigu running down Flanagan during the last 50m and eventually winning by  a Gnat’s nose.

Now, are these images perfect? No, but these capture  two tremendous athletes reaching for the line, where one broke the American Indoor record with a time of 14:47.618 which was only good enough for second place, beaten by 0.005 of a second as Ejigu ran 14:47.613…make them kinda special!!!

To see a larger version of this image click here

Even though I wasn’t suitably equipped I stayed with the action and put this finish on record.

Shot  settings:

• IS01600
• f/2.8
• 1/400th
• Metering  - center-weighted average
• Focal length 200mm

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