 Emotional moments, be they from the Olympics, the World Cup or any other spectacle of sport in greatness, gives photography a chance to show how powerful a medium it is for taking shared emotion and distilling it down into one defining photograph. With the Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo coming up, this seems like a perfect time to revisit some of these iconic images from the world of sport. How's it? How's it? The sports photographer is much like a photojournalist, often an unsung hero. Their images are seen daily by millions of people around the world, far more than would say see a Cartier-Bresson image or Herbritz photograph and yet their names often go unmentioned. These sports photographers bring the Olympic Games to life and into our homes on a daily basis, not in the portraits of the sports stars but in the moments that define those stars. Even if we don't follow the sport, a great photograph tells us all we need to know to be able to share in the drama of joy, anguish and triumph that plays out on the track or in the pool or on the race course. A picture is worth a thousand words and of course how true it is, especially within sports photography. Think about those iconic moments that you've enjoyed as a sports fan. Now in your mind, most of them are probably those single images, the individual moments that you saw after the event. Being of a certain age, I have drawn some of these images from my own sporting childhood memories. You don't actually recall watching the Olympics of 1980 or 1984 but because I was given brochures about those two events and that I flicked through them and looked at those iconic images, the photographs of those sporting legends are still as fresh in my mind as they were then. I never watched Mary Lou Retton's whole routine but I do know what those iconic photographs that were captured meant for the American public. Zola Butt, a Mary Decker, locked in a rivalry, that running battle that ended in controversy. What about the moments in history where the Olympic ideal and politics merged? In English football, a single image defines the sport for a whole nation. It weighs heavily in the public consciousness. This is the England team winning the World Cup in 1966 and it's at once both a triumphant image but also a sour reminder of the 55 years that have passed since that false promise of a new dawn. Outside of Rocky Films, I probably watched about 10 minutes of actual boxing in my life but if I had to explain boxing to somebody or to myself, I would draw on these iconic images and then certainly with boxing images the word iconic is correct. Why is it for a sport that so few of us actually watch that boxing images are so powerfully able to embed themselves in the public mind? Is it because these photographs are almost poetic in their display of a contest that's actually quite brutal? These photographs manage to connect us in some deep, primal way. Perhaps it's because at the heart of these photographs there are people. There are people just like us but unlike us they have committed themselves to the pursuit of a sporting goal. It could be Olympic gold. It could be a world title or just a burning desire to simply be the very best. Sometimes as we know all too well from our own childhood dreams of sporting greatness, the odds are usually heavily stacked against us. So when we watch these Olympians we share in their emotions as they reach and they grasp for those goals. Many times it's lost by millimeters. Of course such fine margins are the difference between triumph and failure. The contrast though is this extreme outpouring of relief of joy of happiness when these lofty heights are actually finely scaled. So what is it that connects us on this primal level that makes these images so powerful? It's not the sport itself or a specific moment that in a wider sense may mean nothing to us. Very few people watching this video will have watched Aussie rules and probably even fewer know who these players are in this photograph. But what is in the photograph that is universal is the humanity between these two ladies. Even now when I researched this video I went back to that well of images that stick in my mind from that late 70s early 80s period. Olympic decathlete Daly Thompson competing for gold at the 1984 Olympics in LA. Anfield legend Kenny Douglas leading Liverpool to dominate English football and me discovering gridiron and a certain Joe Montana and yes I do actually know the rules still and though these days for various reasons I'm not going to bore you with I support the bucks for my sins. It's the emotions in these images that we connect with. For a brief moment in time we get to share in the way it must feel to these athletes as they push themselves to the very limits of their capabilities in pursuit of a dream. Despite not being there we can revisit these moments again and again thanks to the work of these amazing sports photographers. Over the summer if you are taking photographs of sport try and capture some of that humanity in emotion in your photographs. If you've enjoyed watching this short video about the power of photography then check out my other videos where I go more into the art and the emotion behind photographs in general. I'm sure you'll enjoy it. Anyway thanks for watching and I'll see you again soon.