Sol Neelman
Weird Sports
May 2 - Jun 1, 2024
In my series Weird Sports, I explore the joy and community surrounding people’s love of nontraditional sports. They include surreal competitions like: Big Wheel racing, barstool skiing, log riding, lightsaber fencing, and live monster wrestling.
Many of these events are more performance art than competitive sport, a celebration where a participation trophy is the ultimate medal of excellence. All weird sports aim to achieve the same goal: bring together like-minded, creative, and active humans, often in costume and usually with cheap beer in hand.
As it so happens, the final photo in this 15-year-old photo collection—of a weird beer tossing competition in Wyoming—was taken on March 11, 2020, right at the very start of the pandemic, creating an unintentional time capsule of life and laughter before the world came to a halt.
Growing up without a father, who died when I was 2, sports always had a huge role in my life. If I could play and talk sports, I could connect with kids in the neighborhood. To a deeper degree, this project on weird sports allows me to witness—and document—the joy I always imagined I’d have with my father if he was still alive, whether going to a Cubs game or playing catch in the backyard.
I’ve always yearned for that connection and joy, something this body of work strives to celebrate.
Sol Neelman (American, b. 1970, he/him/his) is a successful bench player turned professional sports photographer hailing from the wonderfully weird Portland suburb of Hillsboro.
After squeaking by with a journalism degree at the University of Oregon (Go Ducks!), Neelman launched his photography career in 1996 with a humanitarian agency based in Sarajevo. The following year, Neelman returned to Oregon and landed a newspaper gig in McMinnville with the News-Register. In 2000, he split to photograph for the Beaver State’s largest paper, The Oregonian. Right before exiting for a freelance career in 2007, he was part of a team at The O that won a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting.
Since then, Neelman has traveled the world chronicling some of the weirdest sports on Earth. In that time he has cheated death on a 60-foot forklift, been knocked unconscious by a bronco at a prison rodeo, and tumbled off a ski lift overloaded with furries. Oh, he also covered the Olympics once or twice.
Neelman’s work has graced the pages of pretty much every publication worth reading, from National Geographic to ESPN to The New York Times to Penthouse (long story). Advertising clients include one or two companies you might know of, including Nike, adidas, and Clif Bar. He has also published three Weird Sports photo books with world-renowned fine art book publisher Kehrer Verlag.