Earlier this week as I was biking to Brighton Center, I noticed a statue in front of the Taft Middle School that I had never paid attention to before. It depicts Harold Connolly, an 1956 Olympic gold medalist in the hammer throw who grew up in the area and attended Taft, Brighton High, and Boston College. I was amazed that in my five years of biking this route, I could go so long with out even seeing it. I was prepared to write about how radically our perceptions are filtered by habit and how familiarity prevents us from seeing what’s right in front of us, or something like that. But according to Harold’s website, hammerthrow.org, the statue has only been up since December 10, 2005, so apparently I’ve only missed it for a few months rather than a few years.

It’s no small feat to represent the motion of a hammerthrower in action, as sculptor Pablo Eduardo has done here.