“Today, I have ice hockey...,” she said, adding that this was “for myself or for the fun of it”, but later that night the photographer will be covering the women’s singles free skate event. The event is “quite important,” Lyn pointed out, because of Russia’s Kamila Valieva, the 15-year-old figure skater who tested positive for a banned substance but was allowed to compete. If Valieva were to clinch a podium finish, the Olympics would not hold a flower ceremony. “Tonight, we'll see.” (Valevia finished fourth.)

The week before, the teen phenom made history by landing a quadruple jump, making her the first woman to do so at the Olympics. Lyn picked up on how something special was about to happen. As a former figure skater, she could differentiate between doubles, triples and quads. As a fan of the sport, she felt how “the energy was really different” as the crowd let loose a long “ooooh” when Valevia accomplished the feat. “It was surreal because it was so fast but you knew it was incredible,” she said. 

Capturing emotion in the small moments

The photographer had a plan for the women’s singles free skate event finals: “I want to capture emotion.” Covering the qualifying round, Lyn perched herself on higher ground to capture the action—“a clean shot with the logos”, she said—but for the finals, she planned to go down to the field of play, eye level with the action. She knew she had to get closer: “Tonight is the final, and every time [after] the figure skaters [complete their routine], they will cry.”

At every event, Lyn also looks out for the small moments when an athlete readies himself. “Sometimes they will pray like Yuzu [Japanese figure skater Yuzuru Hanyu]...I realised that a lot of people don’t notice. It's just a one- or two-second thing. They will take the necklace out and kiss it and hold it and pray.”

The moment an athlete’s name and country are announced also make for emotional photographs. “That's a beautiful moment,” Lyn said. “And after that, there's a sense of quietness so you can mark your place. I think that time is when you know that, ‘Okay, I did my best... And now I’ll just let the hard work show’.” 

Lyn’s own experience training and competing for the national team has equipped her with a unique insight into the minds of these elite athletes in a pressure-cooker environment.

Knowing the sport also has its advantages. Lyn feels at home at the skating rink, which helps her choose the best vantage points to photograph different kinds of skaters. She knows, too, the moves (“There are times when they turn their body, they mark their checkpoint, and I’ll know where they're jumping”) and all the nuances that would make for an image with impact, whether a macro shot that situates a duo spinning against the bigness of the arena or a zoomed-in frame that depicts the anguished face of a figure skater in motion. 

Immortalizing big dreams and hard work

And yet, it doesn’t matter to Lyn whether her photographs look good or not. What’s more important is if “I feel like I did my job.” One athlete described the way she shoots as “not sports photography—it’s a soulful kind of image”. 

Another athlete told her how Lyn captured the ineffable: “She never said the photo was great. She just said, ‘You captured the image I always dreamed of, how I dreamed I was in the Olympics. You actually immortalized it’,” Lyn recounted. “I think that is more than enough for me.”

It’s been 12 years since the photographer hung up her ice skates. Living in Southeast Asia plus a knee injury made the dream of going further in the winter sport impossible so she made new plans, pursuing architecture and, while at school, learning photography.

Never in her wildest dreams did Lyn imagine she would return to the rink. But now she is able to contribute something else to the sport and to her fellow athletes. “They work all their life just for that three minutes. So it's really special to be able to, in that three minutes, come up with stunning pictures and more so a timeless picture for them to remember. You're capturing their hard work, essentially.”

Annice Lyn is an Asia’s Most Influential 2021 honouree. Read her profile on our list.

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