There are some times when I feel like I miss all the good stuff. Must be something left over from my childhood, when I was utterly and totally excluded from the Cool Kids’ Table.
The finish of this year’s Tour de Tucson felt like that. A pack of riders flew toward me, I got a shot, and on they blazed, toward the finish line. Said finish line was less than a mile away from where I was shooting.
Would a winner emerge from that pack and zoom away with the top finish in the 2021 Tour de Tucson? You know the shot. There’s a guy in front, several feet separating him from the also-rans, and he’s raising his arms to the sky.
Or would it be like 2019, when I got my own version of The Shot? It’s Tour winner Ulises Alfredo Castillo Soto rounding the final corner of the race, and BAM! It’s a head-on shot by Martha .
This year, it took more than 30 minutes to determine the winner of the 102-mile Tour de Tucson. It literally was a photo finish, and the top honor went to Gerardo Ulloa. Wish I could have seen that one, but Bike-tographer Martha wasn’t issued finish line credentials.
Instead, I pedaled my Official Bike-tography bike to South 6th Avenue and enjoyed a morning of traditional bike-tography. That’s using your bicycle to carry one camera body and one lens, and photographing the best of what you see.
From my South 6th Avenue vantage point, I got the opportunity to see Tucson in transition while covering the bicycle racing action. For many years, this has been a run-down area, but, with the revitalization of Downtown, real estate along South 6th has become quite valuable. You’ll clearly see the changes in my 2021 Tour de Tucson photo gallery.
TIP: This is my 10th year on the Tour de Tucson sidelines, and you can see all of my photos in this gallery.