While interning on the photo editing desk of The Washington Post, I was assigned to their Tokyo Olympics coverage team.
Throughout the Games, my primary responsibility was to photo edit the Post's daily Olympics print section. To do this, I worked with photo editor Thomas Simonetti and collaborated with the reporters, text editors and print designers on the coverage team.
In addition to photo editing the print section, I live-edited The Post's on-site photographer Toni L. Sandys, coordinated with the Post's A1 team when they included Olympics images and stories and created a visually-driven web presentation of the Games' "firsts."
This story prominently featured Naomi Osaka and Rui Hachimura, two athletes who represented Japan and are mixed-race. Both also had prominent roles in the Games’ opening ceremony — Osaka lit the Olympic Cauldron and Hachimura was one of Japan’s two flag bearers. They were the obvious visual ledes for this story, and I used the color red to tie the page together. After seeing the visuals I found for the story, the team decided to run this story as our Olympics cover page.
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On the final day of the Olympics, the team suggested we lead our section with a visually-driven essay of the game’s “firsts,” including its first skateboarding and surfing medals, first out transgender athlete to medal and first medals for several countries. I combined images from the wire and from Post photographer Toni L. Sandys and worked with the design team on this Olympics cover, an inside photo page and this web presentation.
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I chose this photo of Carissa Moore winning the the first-ever surfing gold medal to lead our Olympics print section, with the story jumping inside and featuring another photograph of Moore celebrating. Also on this page is the U.S. women’s team winning the Olympic’s first women’s three-on-three basketball tournament. I worked alongside photo editor Thomas Simonetti, who had live-edited photographer Toni L. Sandys during the game, to decide the lede and secondary photos for that story.
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The Olympics team had two stories about gymnasts Sunisa Lee and MyKayla Skinner, concerns about space inside and no set story for the Olympics cover. I reached out to a designer, and together we suggested we run the two stories side-by-side on the cover, filling that hole while simultaneously conserving space inside the paper. I found wire images of Lee and Skinner to diptych on the page and to run inside.
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This Olympics cover leads with an image of the Nippon Budokan, a building judo competitor Colton Brown calls “a temple of judo” in this story. Judo was created in Japan in 1882 and the Nippon Budokan was originally built for the 1964 Tokyo Games — the first time judo appeared in the Olympics. The secondary photo is of Brown himself, whose relationship to judo and the Nippon Budokan frames this story.
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This photo edit was actually built around the image of children wildly celebrating Ryo Kiyuna winning the first Olympic gold medal in men’s karate kata. As they watched his win on television, they jumped with excitement and waved signs. This, compared to Kiyuna himself, who remained steely calm as he completed his event and took a moment to bow at the center of the mat.
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Washington Post photographer Toni L. Sandys photographed the U.S. men’s basketball team with their fourth-straight gold medal, ending an Olympic tournament where they initially struggled, losing their first Olympic game since 2004. I live-edited Sandys during the game, processing photos and sending them to be used in the game’s ‘live update’ story. For the print edit, I led the page with the photograph of the team celebrating, pairing it with a photo of Kevin Durant, who was a U.S. team captain and led all scorers in the gold-medal game.
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Jessica Fox won gold in the first-ever Olympics women’s canoe slalom. The sport has existed for men, but this was the first year women could compete in canoeing. Fox, considered a canoeing legend in Australia, has three other Olympic medals, all in kayaking. In photo editing the page, I paired a wider image of Fox that showed the intensity of the course with a tighter image of Fox’s face, showing her personal intensity as she battled the water around her.
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Throughout the Tokyo Olympics, I photo edited our “Olympics Roundup” print pages. Each page included four images, each corresponding to the events included in the roundup. Here are three examples from the end of the Olympic Games
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