Phillips Idowu is standing at attention and levitating over a sandpit. The pale sand, and Idowu's trademark long white socks, glow; the rim of small windows around the huge hall in which he levitates, glow. Idowu's coach Aston Moore looks up at him, holding a long rake, which angles down between them.

If you were fanciful, you might almost think Moore has propelled his athlete into the air by pulling a giant lever.

This mysterious scene is one of the images assembled in a series of striking new photographic portraits of top athletes in training, alongside the people who, like Moore, have lifted them towards their Olympic and Paralympic ambitions.

The exhibition, which opened this week at the National Portrait Gallery, also includes pictures of those involved in the staging and projection of next year's Games.

The 37 portraits on show are by Emma Hardy and Finlay MacKay, the latest photographers to be commissioned for the Road to 2012 project as part of the Cultural Olympiad.

Road to 2012: Changing Pace is the second exhibition in a three-year cycle funded by BT that documents Britain's top athletes and key figures behind the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The contrast between the two photographers is marked. Hardy's studies of those who have helped deliver the Games, and those who will be involved with it in terms of contributing, organising or broadcasting, are apparently simple and informal, often catching them in outdoor settings.


Thus, we see Sebastian Coe, chairman of the London 2012 Organising Committee and the man whose dynamism and drive played a huge part in directing the Games to London, looking as if he is pausing for a moment during a run as he stands, hands on hips, halfway up a hill in a London park. The former double Olympic 1500 metre champion is still pin thin, although his face looks careworn and there are the first flecks of grey in his dark hair. The shapes of his arms, clad in a black training top, are complemented by the arms of a dark tree behind him.

The picture of Chris Allison, the Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner who was appointed National Olympic Security coordinator in 2009, is similarly informal, as he stands in front of a table tennis table, clutching his hat in both hands and looking as if he is about to exit the building. But Allison is neatly framed by the rectangle of the white door behind him, and surrounded by others formed by the windows of the room he is in, and those of the table.

Why is this pleasing? I don't know. But it is.

Roger Mosey and Adrian Warner - respectively Director of London 2012 for Olympic host nation broadcaster, the BBC, and BBC London Olympics correspondent - are pictured by the Serpentine on a sunny April morning. Mosey, slightly in the background, toys with a water bottle; Warner, as if in presenter-mode, looks up to his right, hands clasped before him in a kind of reverse Prince Philip. Artless? No. "We were doing what we were told," Warner maintains.

MacKay's pictures of athletes and mentors, sometimes in the same frame, sometimes shot in slightly different versions of the same location, are like mysterious installations.


The Idowu picture, for instance. Presumably this is a standard drill - vertical jumping. But the image - and the lighting - turns what may be mundane into something mysterious.

MacKay's preposterous and exuberant study of the rising Taekwondo talent Aaron Cook has a similar effect. He is doing something, which, probably, he has done many thousands of times, namely launching a flying kick into a thick blue pad held by his brother Luke, who helps him with his training. But Cook is in a tracksuit, and the action is taking place just in front the garage door of his house in Manchester on a snowy day last December. As their boys lay on the action in their driveway, parents Christine and Nigel - who moved house from Dorset so that Aaron could train regularly at Manchester's GB Taekwondo Academy - stand watching them from their small front garden, another blue practice pad in between them.


It's like a scene from a dream. As is the image of the three women sailors currently leading the world in Match Racing - Lucy and Kate MacGregor and Annie Lush - as they stride in separate directions from the shallows at the Olympic sailing venue in Weymouth, while behind them their boat, bright white against a sky dark with impending rain, is hoisted up out of the water. An accompanying image shows their coach, Maurice Paadenkooper, standing in a launch beneath their suspended craft.

Another MacKay shot, taken at Bedford University, shows 2008 Paralympic swimming double gold medallist Eleanor Simmonds on her blocks, water dripping from her, ready to plunge back into the water as her coach, Billy Pye, a former miner, sits in the foreground, staring towards the other end of the pool.

"She might have qualified, she might have gone, but she wouldn't have achieved what she achieved in Beijing without Billy," are the accompanying words supplied by Val Simmonds, Eleanor's mother.

This exhibition couldn't be simpler to view. Walk in the doors of the NPG, do down the stairs, you're there. It's effect - less simple. But one thing it did as far as I was concerned was isolate some of the people and relationships involved in the vast, oncoming wave of the Olympics, and give them their own particular weight and value.

All these people have been, and are, working towards an end that will manifest itself a year from now. It is exciting.

The National Portrait Gallery/BT Road to 2012 Project
July 25 - September 25, 2011
Studio Gallery and Ondaatje Wing Main Hall, National Portrait Gallery, London,
Admission Free
www.npg.org.uk/roadto2012

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the last five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames. Rowbottom's Twitter feed can be accessed here.