Sideline Acrobats

[世岩 최삼송]

September 18, 2005 Sideline Acrobats Photographs by JOACHIM LADEFOGED Cheerleading is, in the popular imagination, the soft, sweet stuff of fall afternoons - the bright colors and big smiles, the irony-free heartland enthusiasm, the sideshow aspect of exhorting players and crowds by way of pompoms and short skirts. But the truth is that cheerleaders, at the college level at least, happen to be serious athletes. The University of Kentucky squad, whose current members are featured in the following photographs, is the best in the country, having won the national championships of the Universal Cheerleaders Association 14 times since 1985. To watch them in training or competition (or at play in a lake) is to see acrobatic artistry at a literally sky-high level - the women soaring through the air, the men hoisting them up on single upturned palms. To capture the greatness of the Kentucky cheerleaders, the magazine commissioned the Danish photographer Joachim Ladefoged, whose varied body of work includes photojournalism from Albania and Kosovo as well as images of bodybuilders. Ladefoged had the advantage of coming completely fresh to the American cheerleading milieu. "In Denmark, we don't have this kind of tradition," he says. "The guys are always throwing the girls in the air, and from the ground you don't see the guys' faces, because they look up all the time. I had to get around this problem by shooting down from a ladder. It was the only way to capture the faces and their concentration and at the same time completely fill the frame with flying bodies.