The Austin Grand
Prix swimming competition was held this past weekend, Jan. 14-16, at the
Jamail Texas Swimming Center at the University of Texas. It featured some of the top U.S. swimmers including 2008 Beijing Olympic medalists Michael Phelps, Jason
Lezac, and Ryan
Lochte.
Nobody will ever forget Jason
Lezak's 2008 Olympic performance when he made up what seemed an impossible deficit in the final leg of the 400-meter freestyle relay, stunning the favored French team and keeping Phelps' gold medal string alive.
Lezak is pictured below in Lane #3.
14-time gold medalist Michael Phelps, returned to the pool where as a 15-year old he became the youngest man to set a swimming world record. The 1:54.92 Phelps clocked in the 200-meter butterfly in March 2001 lasted only a few months as a world record before he lowered it, but it still remains a pool record here in Austin. Below, Phelps competes in the 100-meter backstroke.
Six-time Olympic medalist and 2010 American and World Swimmer of the Year, Ryan
Lochte won the 200-meter freestyle Friday night.
A nice moment of Phelps with his mom after the competition.
The one thing I learned from photographing this event, is that shooting a swimming competition is hard!! Without access to the pool deck level and an amazing zoom lens, it is difficult to grab the images that we see in SI that look so stunning. All in all it was fun, and it was neat to see these icons of the sport that thrilled us so much in the summer of 2008.
Last night the UT Tower was bathed in orange lights in honor of the McCombs School of Business students who won the GE Experienced Commercial Leadership Program Case Competition.
The Tower is usually illuminated in all white lights , but on special occasions it will look like it does in these pictures. In 1947 Carl Eckhardt helped create guidelines for using the orange lights.
The full Tower glowing orange represents a victory over Texas A&M in football, Commencement, UT's birthday (9/15), Texas Independence Day (3/2), and other special occasions the university president deems appropriate.
I had been waiting for an occasion that the Tower would be lit this way so I could shoot a set of photos for my collection. I noticed that the campus had different buzz about it when the Tower looks this way. I saw many students out stopping just to gaze at the Tower, taking pictures with their phones and heard many just commenting on how beautiful it looked. Pretty neat!!
