Most of my friends know I'm not particularly interested in sports. It's true, sports never interested me and I rarely participated in competitions. At school, yes, I pretended to play soccer because it was compulsory. I even managed to break a friend's leg during a match. What's more, he was running after me, so breaking his leg was no mean feat! I didn't hurt anyone in rugby, but that was only because, knowing the consequences, I avoided catching the ball like the plague. I even enjoyed rowing, and although I wanted to row alone, I made the eights team. Fortunately, I was always an alternate in competitions, so I never had to demonstrate my skills—or rather, lack thereof.

The idea of ​​showing my sports-related photos seemed rather strange to me. However, looking through my extensive archive, I discovered that quite often my photos depicted something that could be classified as sports in the broadest sense. In the 1970s, after the success of our players, I decided to photograph a few of them in more personal situations than sporting ones. And here we are: young goalkeeper Jan Tomaszewski waiting in line at a primitive grocery store or in his new, recently renovated apartment. Włodzimierz Lubański in his kitchen. These were celebrities of the time, and it turns out they lived just like all of us back then. In the same dingy apartment blocks, with the same ugly furniture. Then, in Moscow in 1984, I had the opportunity to photograph the circumstances surrounding the Soviet Union's boycott of the Olympic Games. At the beginning of martial law in Poland, I managed to photograph the Legia Warsaw vs. Dynamo Tbilisi football match, so for Polish fans, it was a Poland-USSR match. I didn't watch the players themselves or their performance—I don't even remember who ultimately won. The presence of armed soldiers on the pitch, facing the fans, was far more interesting to me. In the 1980s, I photographed actress Dorota Stalińska working out at home for an article about the popularity of fitness—which, in a sense, is a sport—and here it is: the cover of Newsweek! In 2002, I even traveled to the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, where, whenever I could, I photographed the sidelines of this important sporting event.

Whether I intended to or not, I accumulated a wealth of photos, if not of sports, then about sports. I leave true sports photography to the professionals who specialize in it. And I take my hat off to my colleagues who specialize in it, because it's a very demanding specialty, and their skills are immense.