Iconic Photos

The Giro d’Italia — more famously known as the Giro — is a long distance bicycle race in May or June. Inspired by the Tour de France, the race was started in 1909; to copy’s the Tour de France’s victorious yellow jersey, the winner of the Giro always gets a pink jersey (maglia rosa) – pink being the color of the event’s main sponsor, the newspaper La Gazella dello Sport.

The Giro is the sporting event for bikers, and the race has seen a fair share of intense rivalries. The most famous rivalry was perhaps between Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi, arguably the greatest feud in cycling history. Gino Bartali was the undisputed champion of Italian cycling until Fausto came along. The latter beat his older rival time and again, winning the race five times and le Tour de France twice. (Gino won the Giro thrice and Tour de France once). Italy took sides between the religious, rural Gino and the self-professed atheist from Italian north, Fausto. Even the Vatican took sides: Pope Pius XII naturally supported religious Gino Bartali and refused to bless one race because Coppi was riding in it.

Their personal rivalry was more acidic. In an era when performance-enhancing drugs were not yet forbidden, Coppi admitted to using them almost all the time. Doping infuriated his older rival, who would often keep spies, ransack Coppi’s room or picked up Coppi’s bottles to figure out what special drug Coppi was using. In 1949 at the world championships, both quit the race rather than help each other win. They apparently reconciled for 1952 Tour de France, but unfortunately the above picture was taken which would alienate two again.

On the surface, it seemed like a simple symbol of brotherhood and sportsmanship, and it is. In Italy, it became an iconic image. It showed Coppi (right) holding a water bottle and reaching back to Bartali during the climb of the Col de l’Iseran. Or did it? There followed an extensive debate over who was giving the bottle to whom. Coppi said he was giving it to Bartali. Bartali insisted, “I did. He never gave me anything.” They argued about it for years until Coppi’s premature death from malaria in 1959.

So this week, I went to my dad’s place and played squash with him. Midgame, he brought up the blog I was writing (i.e., this one) and how he had been checking it recently. It is always flattering to hear something like this from one’s own dad and also more surprising to know that one’s dad can use internet! (jk dad). Anyhow, he said he was quite sad that I don’t cover that many photos from sports — although a lot of iconic stuff happens there. So I came back, sat down and wrote this. This one is for you, dad.

“The fat lady sang. Actually, she screeched. Then she scratched her crotch and spat,” wrote Sports Illustrated. In 1990, comedian Roseanne Barr was booed by fans at San Diego Padres-Cincinnati Reds game at Jack Murphy Stadium. She later claimed that she was initially having trouble hearing herself over the public-address system, so her solution was to plug her ears with her fingers and sing as loudly as possible.

Her rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was not well-received, but her behavior following the song impounded her faux pas. Barr mimicked the often-seen actions of baseball players by spitting and grabbing her crotch as if adjusting a protective cup. Barr’s husband, Tom Arnold, later made a ceremonial pitch, but Barr got more boos as she waved to the crowd and left with him.

Barr had been encouraged by baseball officials to “bring humor to the song”, but the routine offended many, including the players on the field. The popular sit-com comedian was public enemy number one. President George H.W. Bush called it “disgusting” and “a disgrace”. Barr never apologized, and remained defiant. In her 1994 book, “My Lives”, she wrote “I think I did great and people wanted more” and “I’m not Anne Frank, gotta hide out because the PC police are gonna find me and kill me. I’m an American, and that is my song, too. What you gotta be – Pavarotti (who sometimes lip-syncs, by the way), or Liza or Barbra to sing the national anthem?”

The creator of Peter Pan, Sir James M. Barrie, was an enthusiastic cricketer and assembled the most extraordinary amateur cricket team ever to have taken the field. Some of the Edwardian England’s most famous authors including Arthur Conan Doyle, A. A. Milne, P. G. Wodehouse, and Jerome K. Jerome, regularly turned out for Barrie’s team from 1890 until 1913, when the team was brought to an end by the First World War.

The team was named Allahakbarries in the mistaken belief that ‘Allah akbar’ meant ‘Heaven help us’ in Arabic (rather than ‘God is great’). Team selection criteria was based more on celebrity status than talent, although in Conan Doyle, both converged. Barrie had to explain rules of the game including which side of the bat to wave at the ball to wooly author Augustine Birrell (later First Secretary for Ireland during the Easter Rising), en route to his first match! Yet, Barrie was extremely proud of (and also simultaneously amused by) his talentless team and wrote a book about it, titled Allahakbarries C.C., and dedicated it ‘To Our Dear Enemy Mary de Navarro’, the famous American stage actress Mary Anderson, who once bowled him out. Barrie himself — an unatheltic and frail Scot — was no better at the game, although he once bowled out Douglas Haig, later the commender of British Expeditionary Force in World War One.

Absent from the above picture taken in 1903 were big names like Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, Milne or Jerome (all were part of the group at times), but it was still a respectable collection of artists none the less. Back row from left to right: E.W. Hornung of Raffles fame, author and poet E. V. Lucas, P.G.Wodehouse, J.C. Smith, G. Charne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, big game hunter Hesketh-Hesketh Prichard, illustrator L. D. Luard, painter C. M. Q. Orchardson, landscape and flowers painter Leonard Charles Nightingale, A. Kinross.

Front row from left to right: C. Gascoyne, author Shan F. Bullock, painter G. Hillyard Swinstead, architect Reginald Blomfield, the Hon. W. J. James, American illustrator and painter Edwin Austin Abbey, painter Albert Chevalier Taylor, J. M. Barrie, German-English poet, criminologist George Cecil Ives and painter George Spencer Watson.

Sitting on ground: author and politician A. E. W. Mason, best remembered for his novel Four Feathers. Mason introduced Barrie to Hesketh-Hesketh Prichard and Robert Falcon Scott, two greatest explorers of the day. Barrie, seemingly forever lost in fantasy, had deep fascination with explorers.

Snaps of the team playing were recently unearthed and will be published in the book next week, Peter Pan’s First XI.

They say modern Olympics began in 1896 with Pierre de Coubertin. In fact, the Olympics as we know it today began in 1992 Barcelona. Before Barcelona, the public interest in the games had been pretty low. For instance, Los Angeles had been the only bidder for the 1984 Games. However, LA’s commercial success made the next bidding process, in 1986, hotly contested. Barcelona beat Paris, Belgrade, Brisbane, Amsterdam and Birmingham (?!)  to host the Games. With the fall of the Soviet Union, its athletic hegemony too was gone, with many newly independent states from the former USSR and Yugoslavia participating as independent states. (Many CIS states participated under the banner of the United Team.) With the Iron Curtain and the Apartheid gone, Germany and South Africa returned to the games.

Also, the 1992 Games mark the beginning of the flamboyant opening torch ignitions that has been the Olympic norm since. An archer who competed in the Paralympic Games, Antonio Rebollo lit the flame by firing a burning arrow towards the cauldron. Well, actually he didn’t, but it seemed he did. Rebollo was instructed to overshoot the cauldron for safety measures (although shooting a flaming arrow into the Barcelona night sky isn’t probably that much safer), and the cauldron was gradually releasing fuel into the air, so when the flaming arrow passed over it, it ignited itself, tricking the eye.

Some 200 archers were initially chosen based on three criteria: they must have no fear of fire; must be able to use an ancient-style wooden bow (without modern sighting devices); and they must already be precise enough to shoot from a distance of about 100 steps. To keep the ceremony a secret, they could not practice in the main Olympic stadium, and trained secretly on a hillside nearby in the early hours when no one was around. For ten months, there were sunrise practices with actually flaming arrows which singed fingers and machines that simulated various weather conditions and crowds. Four finalists were kept until just two hours prior to the ignition, lest an accident would occur (with flaming arrows, they usually do). But Rebollo was not appreciated: he later complained to a Spanish newspaper that he received no official accreditation or tickets to see any of the events, not even the archery!

If a single picture ever conveyed the sexual liberation, permissive society and hostility towards norms and authorities of the 1970s, it would be the iconic poster of “The Tennis Girl”. Taken at the end of the long hot summer in September 1976, the photo was not an accidental shot. Martin Elliot, then a photography student in Birmingham, asked his then girlfriend, 18-year old Fiona Butler to borrow a tennis dress, a racket and balls and to pose for him.

Martin’s photo of Fiona lifting her dress and revealing that she was not wearing underwear is perhaps tame by today’s standards, but when he sold it to poster chain Athena, which published as part of the calendar for the Queen’s 1977 Silver Jubilee, it caused a sensation. Critics dismissed it a “schoolboy’s fantasy”, while Elliott himself said, “it is not a picture I would buy”, for it had only the appeal of a voyeuristic postcard. But it didn’t deter hundreds of thousands of schoolboys to grace their bedroom walls with it. It sold 2 million copies.

It was parodied in advertisements, served as the background of Spitting Image and various celebrities (including Alan Carr and Kylie Minogue) reenacted it. Martin Elliott who died last week at the age of 63 made a fortune out of the poster, but it hindered his career: no one would commission him as they feared he would be too expensive. Fiona Butler was never paid a penny, she eventually married a millionaire and said that she was not embarrassed about posing nor bitter that she didn’t receive any royalties from the photo.

In America, Jacques Henri Lartigue’s claim to fame was that he was replaced from the cover of Life magazine by the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. However, in the wider world, Lartigue was probably the symbol of the transformation of photography into an affordable family pastime. The greatest of the earliest amateurs, he showed how a mundane scene can be transformed into a magnificent image.

He started with photographs of family games and childhood experiences, later moving onto the beginnings of aviation and cars and the women of the Bois de Boulogne. Without even realising it, he became the father of “modern” photography. One of his favourite subjects was the motorcar, which he photographed as early as 1910 in the photo of a two-wheeled bobsleigh taking a turn at 60 km/h.

However, he would receive little attention until September 1954, when the French photography magazine “Points de vue – Images du monde” published “In the heroic times of the motorcar”. Of all photographs of car races taken by Lartigue, the above photo stood out. Automobile Delage, taken at the French Grand Prix in 1912, as someone pointed out, “conveys a remarkable impression of velocity–the wheels of the speeding car are elliptical and tilted forward, their spokes blurred with motion, and the road itself is but a streak of grey”. The picture, ultimately one of Lartigue’s most famous images, transformed him overnight from a painter with photography hobby into “France’s leading amateur photographer”–as the magazine called it. He retired as a society photographer, taking the official portrait for President Giscard d’Estaing.

For someone whose photo career began at the age of six–with his father’s camera–in 1900,the title of his firsbook, a journal he kept throughout his life was especially fitting: Diary of A Century.

Esther Williams was a swimmer-turned-movie star of the 1940s, but Esther herself was less important to her story than Sir David Stevenson, Vice Admiral and Chief of Australian Navy. When he was a lieutenant in Royal Australian Navy during the Second World War, Stevenson wrote “To my own Georgie, with all my love and a passionate kiss, Esther” on a photo of Esther Williams, and gave it to his fellow lieutenant, Lindsay George Brand, who had recently been spurned by the girl he loved.

Brand put the photo over his bed; it was stolen to another ship by a fellow officer; and, became a ‘trophy’–an object of constant amusement and rivalry among the officers of some 200 US, British, Australian and Canadian ships serving in the Pacific theatre. The original photo became the “trophy copy” kept in a safe location, while the second “fighting copy” was to be stolen or taken by force. After the “fighting copy” had been successfully removed from the custodial ship, the “trophy copy” would be presented to the new owners with appropriate ceremony. The new holders would fly an Esther flag or sent naval signals (signed ‘Esther’) to other ships to indicate where the trophy is. After the war, Esther herself would be a good sport and send a genuine signed photo to the ship that captured the trophy.

Fourteen years and 4000 nautical miles later, in 1957, “Esther” was retired and sent to the Australian Naval Historical Collection. Now residing behind a frame, the trophy was only brought into circulation again very rarely.

The first American president to openly play golf was William Howard Taft. At that time, golf was considered a game for the rich and many politicians kept their golfing private, including Taft’s predecessor Teddy Roosevelt.

Roosevelt thought Taft brought shame to the office of the president by privately engaging in golf. It was Taft’s proclivity for participating in golfing exhibitions and speeches on golf that especially angered Roosevelt. The last straw was said to be the above photo, where overweight Taft made “a mockery of himself, and a mockery of the presidency”.

The photo was taken as Taft opens the Corpus Christi Country Club in Texas. For years afterwards, the club displayed the presidential golf club, ball, and photo in a glass case.

As last week’s tragic luge incident showed us, the Olympics are never free from mishaps. Yet, Vancouver seems to be leading the competition: the Olympic torch malfunctioned and it was fenced off from the public, prompting a headline, “Mr. Furlong, tear down this fence!“. Warm weather caused a lot of trouble while millions of tickets were cancelled.

Probably not as bad as 1996 Games in Atlanta though, when overloaded trains and traffic jams kept athletes and journalists from getting to the events. Many Olympic bus drivers quit while various teams moved out of the Olympic village. Heat, lack of air-condition (even inside the subway) and water created hell for visitors, while various escalators broke down.  The city demanded the computer provider, IBM, to use ‘proven’ technology–i.e., technology that is more than 2 years only–which led to massive computer glitches. It described an Angolan basketball player as three feet tall and another gymnast was 97 years old. It was so poorly managed that France-Soir noted: “Africa has been deprived of the Games since their creation with the pretext that African countries don’t have the necessary infrastructure. After Atlanta, any country in the world can apply to host the Games.” In his closing speech, IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch described the Atlanta Games as “most exceptional”, an ambivalent departure from traditionally speech that has to describe the Games he was closing as the “best ever”.

Perhaps the most famous olympic mishap was at Seoul Olympics in 1988. Normally during an opening ceremony, white doves are released, but during the Seoul opening ceremony, a few of them settled in the cauldron that housed the Olympic flame as it was being lit. (This caused the cancellation of the dove-releasing tradition). Also in 1988, US diver Greg Louganis smashed his head on the board on his ninth preliminary springboard dive, while attempting a 2½ somersault pike. He received stitches before completing his tenth dive. He overcame the head injury to gain the highest score in the preliminaries and qualify for the final and wins a gold medal in Seoul. This extraordinary come-back made Louganis “Athlete of the Year” for ABC. In 1995, it was revealed that Louganis had been HIV positive at the time of the accident and had not informed the doctor treating him for the head injury. The doctor subsequently tested negative for HIV.

Devon Loch was a racehorse owned by HM Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, which entered history books when it collapsed 45 meters before the winning post at the 1956 Grand National steeplechase. It was in the lead but suddenly the horse decided to jump up over an invisible hurdle and collapsed. On his belly, his forelegs out in front, Devon Loch tried to get back onto his feet and more or less collapsed again. Its jockey dismounted. It was over. Another horse, E.S.B. had won. However, the mystery surrounding its collapse elevated the jockey Dick Francis to front-page status, now Britain’s favorite failed hero.

Some claimed Devon Loch suffered a cramp or a heart attack. Others (including Francis) thought a shadow thrown by the hurdle on the other side of the race confused the horse into thinking another jump was required. Confused as to whether he should jump or not, Devon Loch half-jumped and collapsed. Dick Francis also notes the irony of the situation: “I’m afraid it was because of his owner that we lost the race. A quarter of a million people were at Aintree that day, all cheering for the Queen Mother. A crescendo of noise hit him, his hind quarters refused to react for a split second, and down he went.”

Devon Loch was Francis’s eighth and last ride in the National. Although the Queen Mother jovially dismissed the incident as “That’s racing,” her horse trainer urged Francis to retire at the top of his game. He did, but remained good friends with the Queen Mother, who once fetched him water personally when he choked at a dinner. The media on the other hand never let him forget the unfortunate incident. Devon Loch became eponymous with sudden, last-minute failure in the sports world.

Dick Francis found a second career as one of the most famous thriller writers of the 20th century and in fact one of its richest,too–an unbelievable achievement for a sportsman who grew up on gin to preserve his diminutive structure and whose education was rudimentary. In fact, there had been accusations that his wife did all the writing for him and it was under this dark cloud that Dick Francis died this weekend, taking the secret to his grave.

So I was reading this strange article by Christopher Hitchens (who else?) while I saw this photo.

The 1980 Summer Olympic Games were already mired by controversy even before they opened. The United States led the boycott of 64 other countries in protest of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. They instead participated in the Olympic Boycott Games or the “Liberty Bell Classic” in Philadelphia, which opened 3 days before the actual games. Fifteen other countries (mainly European) that participated did so under the Olympic Flag instead of their national flags. The Olympic Flag and Hymn were used at Medal Ceremonies when athletes from these countries won medals. The Soviet television alternately ignored and criticized this.

After setting a new world record on July 30th, Polish pole vaulter Wladyslaw Kozakiewicz made a rude gesture (bras d’honneur) to the hostile, jeering Moscow crowd. The crowd was rooting for Soviet jumper Konstantin Volkov. The image was seen around the world except ironically in the Soviet Union and its satellite states. To many, it signified Polish resentment of Russia’s control over Eastern Europe; in Poland, the gesture became immediately known as Kozakiewicz’s gesture. (gest Kozakiewicza).

After the Olympics, the Soviet ambassador to Poland demanded that Kozakiewicz be stripped of his medal over his “insult to the Soviet people”. The official response of the Polish government was that the gesture had been an involuntary muscle spasm caused by his exertion. Kozakiewicz for his part promptly defected to West Germany.

Throughout the most of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was deemed to have been surrounded by an impenetrable airspace. There was that U2 incident in 1960, and in 1983, a civilian airliner was shot down for failing to respond to Soviet interceptors. But on May 28, 1987, this myth of Soviet might would be challenged by a West German teenager.

Matthais Rust spent his allowances to take 50 hours worth of flying lessons before embarking on an unauthorized flight from Helsinki to the heart of Moscow. Rust was picked up by radar. A Soviet fighter jet was in pursuit, but it could only communicate on military frequencies that Rust’s Cessna couldn’t receive. The Soviets assumed that he was either on a search-and-rescue mission or a student pilot. Six hours later, he made it to Moscow, and decided to land just outside the Kremlin walls. (He worried that if he had landed inside, the Soviets would arrest him and deny the whole thing). He landed by St. Basil’s Cathedral and taxied into the Red Square. Although he mingled with the people there–who thought he was part of an airshow–the KGB was also on spot to arrest him.

For violation of the Soviet airspace and oddly enough, hooliganism, Rust was put on trial. He served 432 days of his four-year sentence. The boy whom the media called “the new Red Baron” or “Don Quixote of the skies” never flew again. Inside the Kremlin walls, Mikhail Gorbechev would use the incident to shake up the Soviet military industrial complex and sack his top-brass.