In Visitors, I invite one person each month to share perspectives on a sport, a sporting event, sporting aspects or any thing in between. This month, Haakon Moerk from Norway joins us to give insights into Norway’s winter sports culture and history. If you would like to contribute for a future edition of Visitors, do not hesitate to e-mail me.

Like in many other countries, sports have a long history in Norway. Even in Snorre’s sagas about the medieval kings there are tales about young noblemen competing against each other, and taunting each other about their respective abilities. However, there exists little recorded history of organised ball games such as in England, Italy and the old Aztec empire, possibly due to the low population density and the long winters that prevented running freely. Instead, Norwegian sports legends concentrate on skiing and skating, and those two sports have retained a high position on the Norwegian ladder until this day.

The Norwegians claim that “the cradle of skiing” lies in Morgedal, Telemark, a small village with approximately 300 citizens. The skiing brothers Hemmestveit, along with ski inventor Sondre Norheim, all came from this snowy village, and dominated the Norwegian skiing scene for much of the 19th century. However, although skiing events, particularly ski jumping, had been hosted in the cities since the mid-1850s, the main cross-country skiers still came from rural settlements, where there was ample opportunity to practise - prepared skiing tracks in the forests around the cities were not yet used by most city dwellers.

While rural dwellers skied between places and developed cross-country and telemark skiing, and also the word “slalom”, speed skating developed as the city sport, as a kind of wintertime relative to track running. The first recorded speed skating race in Norway dates back to 1863, on the sea outside Oslo. Due to the ease of making a speed skating track in the city - often just a case of watering over an athletics track - people flocked to the stadias to watch their heroes, with the 1884 skating race involving the Norwegian skating pioneer Axel Paulsen and a Dutch champion, Renke van Der Zee, drew almost 30,000 spectators. By now, the skating administrators had determined the format that has been common in long track all through its remaining history: the skaters going in pairs against each other, with two marked lanes (the inner and outer) with the skaters changing after every lane, so that no skater could interfere with the other. In the end, the skater with the lowest time won, regardless of what pair he skated in. However, quadathlon (allround) tournaments were quickly introduced, so that the competition would not be immediately over after one race. In the beginning, the winner had to take three of the four races, but as distance specialisation became common and it became almost impossible to win three races, the “time points” (or converting the 5000- and 1500-metre times into how long it would take to skate a 500-metre with the same pace) were introduced.

Speed skating became a city sport because of viewer accessibility. Unlike all other winter sports bar ski jumping, all the action took place in front of the spectators, who could even time the athletes themselves if they so desired. By contrast, cross country skiing took place through the forests, with the athletes appearing one by one as they crossed the finish line. In addition, skating arenas were close to the major city centres, and were often used as football or athletics stadiums in summer. However, much the same applied to ski jumping, where the major event of the season took place at Holmenkollen - three miles outside Oslo. Thus, the ski jumpers, led by the Ruud family from Konsgberg, enjoyed good standing throughout the 30s, while the cross country skiers - who admittedly didn’t win much in competition with Swedes and Finns - were largely forgotten. They were also faced with competition from the athletes in Nordic combined, the ski jumping and cross country put together, using a complicated system similar to that in decathlon.

There were also other winter sports that were under development, including figure skating (where Norway competed with prodigy Sonja Henie in the first four games, and then promptly forgot about the sport) and alpine skiing, where Norway occasionally got good results with ski jumper Birger Ruud finishing fourth at the 1936 Olympics and Stein Eriksen winning the giant-slalom gold in 1952, but nevertheless never hosted any big events, as the centre of the sport’s popularity lay in the Austrian Alps.

Speed skating increased in popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, with the solitary nationwide radio channel, NRK, employing radio reporters telling the nationwide audience all they saw and also provided live lap times on the longer distances. Thus everyone could follow the races as they unfolded. However, coverage of skiing was hampered by the long breaks between each skier, which meant skating came to the forefront - helped by media-friendly skaters such as Knut Johannesen, Per Ivar Moe and Hjalmar Andersen, and commentator Knut Bjørnsen, who also worked in other prominent radio programmes at the time. During this time, there was also high international participation in major events, with competitors from China, Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, Finland and the Soviet Union all being among the favourites before the 1963 World Championships in Japan, and the Cold War battles with the Soviet Union also brought interest.

With popularity grew a culture. The poet and noted speed skating enthusiast Jan Erik Vold has detailed this in several poems, including the book “En sirkel is” (A circle of ice), which includes 25 poems, one poem for each lap of the 10,000 metres, the last distance of the major speed skating championships. Fans travelled to the domestic Norwegian championships - not to mention the European and World - in thousands, bringing food, meat soup, and alcohol-spiked tea. Pens and paper were also a must, as noting down lap times and seeing from the lap time trends how each skater could be expected to perform was a key - along with calculating the time points mentioned before. And of course, every skater deserved the proper respect, and would be noted down on the paper: Vold mentions in his poems that he “couldn’t go before the Austrians Offenberger and Mannsbarth had finished their race”. Neither were anywhere near the top 10.

In the 1960s, speed skating in winter and football in summer were the most popular sports in Norway. This can be shown by the account of author Jon Michelet (born in the 40s, later becoming a seaman, journalist, occasional communist and self-proclaimed “minnow-lover” at football) from the 1990 Football World Cup, where a momentary lapse in concentration caused him to accidentally dub Swedish defender Roland Nilsson as “Johnny Nilsson” - the Swedish skater who won the 1963 World Championships ahead of three Norwegians.

In ski jumping, the centre of the world had moved away from Norway. With too few hills to sustain development, good jumpers were few and far between - Arnfinn Bergmann won the Olympics in 1952, Toralf Engan twelve years later - and it was the Austro-German Vier-Schanzentournee that was seen as the major non-championship event in a season, eclipsing the Holmenkollen events in March. And as the World Championships in skiing were biennial events, the Tournee gained prestige, especially as the best from all over the world travelled down to compete - Bjørn Wirkola from Finnmark, widely acclaimed as the world’s best jumper in the 1960s despite never winning the Olympic gold, based his status mainly on this tournament, which he won thrice.

Part 2 next week…

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 5:27 pm and is filed under Winter Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.