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It’s hard to imagine the work it takes to capture an image. Behind the lens, it takes months ­–sometimes years! – of preparation. I spoke to PA Sports Photographer Tim Goode about his long, winding journey to make a picture when the Tour de France came to Yorkshire.

Sport photography feels quite unlike many other creative pursuits. A painter can spend months agonising over every miniscule detail on their canvas until every pigment has been perfectly applied.

For Tim, it’s over in a flash. The shutter clicks and that’s it, the photo has been made – or indeed in many cases, not made.

It makes sport photography an extremely high-pressure job. You can’t ask Salah to re-score his goal just because you missed it. Or perhaps Nadal could hit that perfectly placed slice again. “You either have it, or you don’t,” as Tim puts it.

As a result, planning and preparation is fundamental to success in sport photography. Months of preparation helps set photographers up for success when the decisive moment finally comes.

When Tim embarked on his journey to capture the Grand Départ as it came through Yorkshire, there wasn’t a lot of information to go off. Usually, some local knowledge would be helpful so that you know the best angles and locations.

He just got the name of one other PA photographer. It was a big one though. Tim explains: “The office told me to call John Giles, the most senior staff photographer at the time. I’d only spoken to him once or twice before but he was incredibly generous with his time and really made me feel like I was part of the team.”

The Tour de France is a huge race. It’s 200 cyclists racing over 2000 miles in just 23 days. A lot of the time in this job, you’re just in a cosy stadium with complete view of the whole game.

So it’s a daunting prospect photographing the Tour de France. Many would crumble under the pressure. But Tim thrives under this pressure. So much so, it led to a picture that became a career-defining one for him.

We went up there a few times to plan what we were going to do,” Tim explains. “It was probably about six or seven months of planning, and I was just happy to be a part of this team on a job which was a big one for PA.”

Tim was based in Nottingham with no prior experience of covering the Tour. So there are few better ways to research then to visit the location and see things with his own eyes. John is a local though, so that gave them a head-start as he was kind enough to share his local knowledge with Tim and the other PA photographers covering it.

Location scouting and access are big issues – but then there’s the policing. As Tim explains: “With the Tour de France, it’s policed by the Gendarmerie, and you can’t mess around. You can’t argue with them. It’s not like the English police where you can have a conversation with them and perhaps work out a compromise. And they closed the roads at around 4am for these stages, so we had to plan what we were going to do with that.”

So no road access from 4am onwards. How did Tim and John get where they needed to be?

“John paid a farmer twenty quid to let us sleep in our cars in his yard so we could avoid the road closures. Then I got up at 5am and walked two or three miles up this hill onto the moors, then waited for this picture.”

It was long wait too, around six or seven hours. Then the peloton finally come through while Tim is locked in a flow state. “I had a look afterwards [on TV],” Tim says. “I think it was less than 20 seconds I had for this picture to work. Covering that was what really solidified that I wanted to do this job.”

Despite all the challenges and pressure, the preparation paid off in the end.