Gerry Cranham was so obsessive about sports photography that he would “stake out” racecourses early in the morning, looking for a nook to hide his camera. “I had to do it discreetly, hide the camera and collect it later,” he recalled. “They would have kicked me off the course if they saw me.”
Pressing the button of the remote camera tucked into the bottom of a fence at Sandown racecourse in 1971, Cranham timed it perfectly. The resulting photograph shows fragments of turf displaced by thundering hooves splattering the frame and the jockey Terry Biddlecombe being flung from his mount while still holding the reins in his left hand.
The image exemplified how Cranham turned sports photography into an art form. “In one frame, he