Many call it photoshopped or AI generated. It is not.

Jerome Brouillet, a photojournalist with the Agence France-Presse news agency, captured a photo Monday that could symbolize the Olympics. The photo shows Brazilian surfer Gabriel Medina seemingly floating above the waves as he sets an Olympic record in Tahiti.

In the photo, the Brazilian surfer appears to be floating in the air, his arm pointing to the sky and his board floating next to him.

The incredible photo was taken after Media scored a 9.9 on the two-metre waves along the Teahupo’o break in French Polynesia. Tahiti, a French territory in the Pacific Ocean, was chosen to host the surfing event due to its storied history as a magnet for big-wave surfers.

Brouillet said The guard He was a little shocked by what he was able to capture.

“The conditions were perfect,” he said. “The waves were bigger than we expected.”

Brouillet photographed the event from a nearby boat.

“So he (Medina) is at the back of the wave and I can’t see him and then he shows up and I took four pictures and one of them was this one,” Brouillet told the newspaper. “It wasn’t difficult to take the picture. It was more about anticipating the moment and where Gabriel is going to start the wave.”

The photos Brouillet takes are automatically sent from his camera to his editors, so he gets immediate feedback.

“I checked my phone during the six-minute break after the shoot and I saw all these notifications on social media. I thought something happened with this shoot and then it got shared on ESPN and I thought, ‘Cool,'” Brouillet said.

“It’s very cool, it’s a nice picture and a lot of people like it. It’s not really a surf picture, so it gets more people’s attention.”

Surfing made its debut at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. Medina finished fourth in Tokyo, narrowly losing the bronze to Australia’s Owen Wright.

Born in Sao Paulo, Medina is a three-time World Surf League winner. In 2009, at age 15, Medina became the youngest surfer to win a major qualifying event. Two years later, he joined the World Surf League Tour. Since 2015, Medina has more Championship Tour wins than any other competitor.

He was the first person to perform a move called the “backflip” during a competition in Rio de Janeiro.

Medina was in the third round of his Olympic surfing competition when the wave came and he defeated Japanese surfer Kanoa Igarashi with a combined score of 17.40 out of 20.

Medina shared the image on his own Instagram, which had received nearly four million likes as of Tuesday morning. He captioned Brouillet’s photo with a Bible verse from Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”

The surfer will now face his compatriot Joao Chianco in the quarter-finals in Tahiti.

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