Best Getty Images from the 2024 Paris Olympics: Week 2

Between the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the 2024 Paris Olympics, Getty Images will have a team of more than 80 photographers shooting as many as 5 million images. Those breathtaking photos are then run through a team of more than 40 editors, live-editing remotely from offices in London.

It's a massive undertaking, a complex amalgamation of human ingenuity and artistic vision with radical technology — top-of-the-line lenses, remote cameras, robotic and underwater cameras and more.

The results are breathtaking and help bring all the emotion of excitement of the games to people around around the world. FanSided is lucky enough to be partnering with Getty throughout these games and each week several photographers will be sharing some of their favorite photos with us and explaining the stories behind them.

Here are Hannah Peters, Alex Pantling and Lintao Zhang sharing what they captured in the second week. Stay tuned for a full round-up of all the best images from the games after the closing ceremonies.

Hannah Peters

This Olympics I’m fortunate to have been given the opportunity to be part of our athletics team. My position is head-on at the end of the 100m line which also involves the set up of four remote cameras in front of me at different lengths set for different lanes and options to cover all angles for the different races happening.

This year, the Women’s and Men’s 100m Finals had been early on in the schedule so we had to make sure everything was looking good right from the start. Right before the Women’s 100m Final, the rain started coming down making the track look like glass which made for something a bit different. As the final was happening, I took a quick look up at the TV screen to see if anyone was clearly in front. Richardson was a hot favorite to take out the 100m however I saw Julien Alfred was in the lead.

Making a split decision to change and focus on her paid off as she celebrated well over the line with rain bouncing off her and the track. The 100m race is very hard to call from front on as we really have no real idea when it's a tight race who is winning so in that moment you have to make a call. 

I had to make a similar call during the Men’s 100m Final as well. This turned out to be the tightest race in history — decided by .005 seconds. I made the decision to go to Kishane Thompson of Jamaica and not Noah Lyles of Team USA because it looked like Thompson won. It was a split second call, but I had cropped Lyles out of the frame in my handheld camera with Thompson being in lane 4.

Thankfully, that’s why we have remote cameras set up to help capture every angle that we photographers can’t physically be in. With four remotes set up to capture the finish line and moments following, I was able to capture Lyles’ photo-finish in lane 7. When the race finished, it went from the loudest roars to a moment of quiet with everyone looking up at the screen to see the final results once we had realized that Thompson may have not been the winner. Since we’re only allowed in certain photo positions, I was able to capture Lyles and Thompson standing together and once the results were revealed, Lyles went nuts!

The remote images I captured became the most important photos I took and those went out from my camera to our editors and onto the Getty Images website within 24 seconds of the race finishing. Before we knew the result in the venue, we had the finish line photo out. It’s all about reacting to what is happening at the moment and making decisions and sometimes they’re in your favor and sometimes they’re not, but that’s why our team takes planning very seriously ahead and during the Games. We set up two days prior in the venue — all the remote and robotic cameras–and given athletics is a marquee event, we have a team of photographers capturing simultaneously each day. We had worked out our photo positions in advance so when it came time for the 100m Finals, it came down to just making it happen.

Alex Pantling

The Paris Olympics is my first-ever Summer Games, something I’ve been excited about since I first broke into the industry. My schedule has been quite varied, but I’ve had the luxury of covering a couple of days of field hockey. The venue has been great photographically due to the high grandstands which create a unique angle looking down on the athletes, and when the sun is shining (which it has been most days) it can make great graphic images. The other reason I’ve enjoyed working at the venue is due to its history. It’s the same venue that hosted the Opening Ceremony and athletics for the 1924 Olympic Games, exactly 100 years ago.

One of the reasons I enjoy photographing hockey so much is how unpredictable it can be. A lot of your time is spent following the action and waiting for that one moment when two players collide and make interesting shapes or drop their stick to show the contact in the sport — this happens quite a lot but you still have to concentrate and be patient.

Another perk of working at an outdoor venue is the chance of a nice sunset or dark moody sky. As much as the Olympic games are about covering the action and the pinnacle of the sport, I find that taking wide scenic pictures is such an important thing to do at every venue I visit as these are the pictures that people will look back on when remembering the Games for what they were.

Lintao Zhang

This is my third time participating in the Olympic Games and I am excited to be in Paris. I’ve been shooting a variety of sports at this year’s Games — from swimming, volleyball, hockey, 3x3 basketball, and badminton — however, this is my first time shooting beach volleyball at an Olympics. When I saw the promotional video for the Paris Olympics, I was amazed by the scenery of beach volleyball and knew it would make for some compelling images both during the day and especially at night. 

I wanted to get the perfect lighting at sunset, however, the shooting challenge with beach volleyball was to follow the rules and not move freely during the competition, so I chose to shoot in the media stand in the first round of the game and then return to the ground. Using a wide-angle lens to wait for the perfect moment, I was able to capture athletes while the Eiffel Tower was in the background. The Eiffel Tower, Olympic rings and Paris 2024 branding all over the venue, provide a picturesque backdrop for all the emotion, action and beauty happening throughout the competition and will be photos that we look back on for years to come.