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It is without question the most notorious sporting photograph of all time. And Andre LeCoq can remember exactly how he came to take it.
“I was behind the goal line in the usual photographer’s spot,” he says of 22 June 1986 in the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City as he watched Diego Maradona rise up with England’s Peter Shilton to meet a high ball with his raised fist. “I was following the ball, watching it all the way. And I could see looking through the lens it was handball. It was obvious to me. I could see it. I was very surprised when the goal was allowed.”
At the time LeCoq was working for the renowned French sports newspaper L’Equipe. He had covered every World Cup since 1962 in Chile, and he knew what he was doing. Nevertheless, even as he developed the picture in the stadium dark room and dispatched it back to his office in Paris, he had no idea of what was going to happen next.
“I just thought, oh well, it is a clear picture but I expect everyone will have it,” he recalls, speaking to Telegraph Sport some 36 years on. “I was astonished, even more surprised than I was that the goal had been given, when I discovered that I was the only person who had taken the shot. I don’t know why no one else took it. But it turned out very well for me.”
It did that. The picture immediately found its way around the world, on to newspaper front pages everywhere that football was watched. Not least in England. Here was all the visual evidence the country needed that their football team had been cheated out of a place in the World Cup final by one of the most flagrant bits of gamesmanship in the history of the game. The picture became a cause celebre. This was the Hand of God caught, well, red handed.
“I am delighted it became so popular in England,” he says. “It was proof Maradona had cheated. It didn’t help the British people – England were still knocked out. But in a way it was an important historical document.”
And for LeCoq the consequences of his timely photography were to last a lifetime.
“The photograph appeared all over the world, in newspapers, magazines, everywhere. It became famous.”
Though fame, he insists, does not always have a financial repercussion.
“No, I did not become rich off the back of it,” he smiles, somewhat wistfully. “I was a staff photographer with L’Equipe, they owned the rights to the image. So it helped them. Yes, I got a bonus, but it was not enough to make me a wealthy man. I suppose what its popularity did was maybe push me up the pecking order at L’Equipe a little, maybe I could choose the better events to cover.”
LeCoq was to continue his work until he retired ahead of the World Cup in his homeland in 1998, the one that France won.
“You could say my timing wasn’t very good,” he laughs. “But it wasn’t like it is today, with digital photography. In my day, you travelled basically with a laboratory. You had to print your own pictures at the time, not quite at the side of the pitch, but in a room under the stands. Once you had the picture, you could wire it to your paper. You had to carry so much kit it was physically exhausting. Maybe I had had enough of weight lifting. I did nine World Cups in all. And I never had another picture like that, that belonged to me alone.”
Finally, however, now there may be some return on his labour. This week, an original print of the picture is to be auctioned. It will feature a sequence of three shots LeCoq took that day, including a perfect view of the other contribution Maradona made, when he ran from the halfway line to score a goal that nobody could argue with.
“I also took a picture of his proper goal. It was one of the greatest goals in World Cup history and I enjoyed watching it happening,” he says. “Now I am very glad that people in England might buy my picture. I know that Maradona’s shirt from that day went for millions of pounds recently. I am not expecting that to happen with my picture, though it would be nice. This was a unique shot, so whoever buys it will be buying something unique.”
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