Everything I know about timing, nerve and reading a moment, I learned cageside first.
There's a story that comes before all the cycling — and it's the one closest to my heart. Combat sports was my first love. Before I ever raised a camera to a bike, I was at the gym with my friends, and that world gave me almost everything I still lean on today: focus, nerve, and the habit of reading a moment a split second before it happens.
I never fought myself — my friends were the ones who stepped into the cage. Aby, Nibas and Tony did the fighting, and they won nearly all of it. My place was on the other side of the fence. The first time I brought a camera along, back in 2018, and started making photos for them, I didn't know it yet — but that was the beginning of everything I do now.
You get one frame and no second chance — I learned that cageside long before I learned it in a finish area.
Shooting fighters teaches you exactly what a bike race would later demand of me. You have to anticipate. You get one frame and no second chance. And the emotion is right there on the surface — fear, relief, exhaustion, joy, sometimes all of it inside the same second. Learning to catch that is the whole job, and combat sports is where my eye was born.
The images I'm proudest of from that world are the portraits of my friend Tony Sipos with his championship belt — the kind of picture where the person, the work and the win all sit in the same frame. Those are the photos that made me want to do this for real.
Combat sports is just something special: the discipline, the respect, the people who become family around it. It's the scene that raised me as a photographer, and I've never really left it.
