Gettyimages.com Is the Best Website on the Internet Right Now

Every four years, we all get a reminder about why still photography is an urgently important art form that must be preserved at any cost: the high-effort Olympic figure skater face, which is always best enjoyed by clicking around the Getty Images site.

You, the person reading this, are a slob who cannot do what these athletes are doing or even conceive of how they use their feeble, breakable human bodies to do it. Just as inconceivable is the idea of doing this in front of an audience, a table of judges, and an army of photographers capturing your grace or clumsiness, success or failure, and everything beautiful or—as the case may be—hideous about your face and body engaged in this famously most competitive of competitive sports.

But look at them ahahahahaha! They’re like “Yergh!!” “Hunnhhh!” Hahahahaha.

And look, we in the U.S. were all shocked by the dramatic poor performance of Ilia Malinin, and there’s nothing to laugh at there. Fortunately, thanks to the quick reflexes and finely honed professional instincts of international sports photographers, there’s no shortage of comedy coming from these Winter Olympics. Just when you think you’ve seen the last funny one, there are hundreds more, often hilarious and astonishing at the same time.

Getty photos, of course, cost money to use without a watermark, but the site itself gives the casual internet user unfettered access to its compulsively scroll-able watermarked library. Searching “figure skating” (I use quotation marks for the search, personally), hitting “EDITORIAL,” and sorting by “Newest” rather than “Best match” gets you the unfiltered feed of photos for sale to media organizations.

You may have to click past a few results pages of unrelated speed skating photos (Ugh!), but you’ll know when you’ve struck a vein of the good stuff, and then the joy begins. The internet used to just be like this, remember? 

Getty Images could probably paywall access to the figure skating photos if it liked money, but fortunately it hasn’t done that which means you get to enjoy the fruits of the Men’s solo events, which have already happened, and watch the photos roll in from the pairs competition today and the women’s events all this coming week, all for free. 

And if you see a sports photographer today, don’t forget to thank them for their service.