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. Part one can be read here. The following is the concluding part. If you would like to contribute for a future edition of Visitors, do not hesitate to e-mail me.

Another sport on the scene was biathlon. A sport molded on cross-country skiing at first, it was difficult to comprehend for viewers, as the biathletes shot on balloons to avoid penalty minutes and the aggregate result wasn’t really known until well after the event. Though Norwegians have a penchant for sports with complicated rules for time calculation, this was taking it too far. Magnar Solberg, a policeman by trade and a true amateur, won Olympic gold both in Grenoble ‘68 and Sapporo ‘72, but never earned anything from it.

Cross-country skiing began to see a small revival, however. It had by now reached the television screens - where viewers were often offered a view of the snow and the forest as the cameras waited for each skier to appear - butafter Gjermund Eggen’s 50 km victory at the home World Championships in 1966, Norwegian skiers failed to back that up with consistent performances. Norway won three of the 20 available men’s gold medals in Olympic and World skiing in the 1970s; the women zero of 16. Norwegians were seen as too backward, too stuck in the old times with meal breaks and gentlemen in jumpers and knickerbockers out in the forest - while the Soviets and East Germans swept the 1974 World Championship with their skis made of glass fibre. Norwegians still fondly remember Magne Myrmo - the last world champion on wooden skis.

Indeed, the resistance to change has been a particular part of Norwegian winter sports culture. Norwegians claim “this is what has made the sport so popular, don’t remove it!” In the 1980s, the American Bill Koch began to experiment with one ski out of the prepared tracks, as he thought it helped him push backwards on the ground (to gain more forward momentum). It worked: Koch won the silver medal on the 30 km in Oslo 1982, behind Lars Erik Eriksen, as Norwegian skiers once again got some good performances at home. Koch also totalled the most points during the World Cup in 1981/82, and remains the only non-European to win the World Cup.

Without mastery of the new technique - known as “skating” since the leg movement of pushing backwards on the snow was similar to what skaters did on the ice - Norwegians were left totally behind on the men’s side. The Swede Gunde Svan dominated the decade, winning seven World Championship titles, four Olympic titles, and five World Cup titles, and the only thing that kept Norwegians interested were the times - and the successes of the women, who proved they could ski too, only 20 years after they had been cautiously introduced into the World Championship with a 5km event in 1962.

Similarly, change started to hit in the speed skating world. The sweaters and trousers of the ’50s were replaced by body suits, which became gradually narrower as the years wore on. But the biggest change came when Eric Heiden, a training phenomenon and medical student from Madison, Wisconsin, changed the face of the sport completely. He remains the only person to win the world allround (the aforementioned quadathlon), sprint (500 and 1000 metres) and junior (quadathlon for youngsters) championships in the same year, which he did in 1977. He then proceeded to win the ‘78 and ‘79 allround championships, won five gold at the Lake Placid Olympics, before a desperate ice groundsman at Deventer soften up the ice for Heiden’s 10,000 metre race and gave Dutchman Hilbert van der Duim the world title. Heiden retired from skating, became a professional cyclist (completing the Tour de France), and later became a doctor with the US team, but he had shown the Europeans that the way they had prepared to the sport really wasn’t good enough. Despite the four S’es gaining some popularity in Norway, everyone knew they weren’t really good enough against the great Heiden, and he really wasn’t much cop in the serious international sport of cycling. As people began to realise that this wasn’t much of a “world sport”, interest waned, and Norway’s poor performances during the 1980s (one world title, courtesy of Rolf Falk-Larssen, who was booed around Bislett in 1981 after finishing 9th on the 10,000 metres and behind Tomas Gustafsson on points - however, due to three distance victories, he won the title) didn’t help either.

In short, by the end of the 1980s, Norwegian winter sports were at an all-time low. It was summed up nicely by the performances in Calgary. No gold medals, as the Swedes took care of skiing and skating (Tomas Gustafson won two gold medals, while the Norwegian hope, Geir Karlstad, fell), and Matti Nykänen fought with Jens Weissflog in the ski jumping hill (though Erik Johnsen managed a silver in the K90). The only hope came when Lillehammer, a backwater town midway between Oslo and Trondheim (Norwegian metropoles, the former the size of Cardiff and the latter the size of Sunderland), was awarded the Winter Olympics. With the Norwegian government pouring money into arenas and sports, and successes starting to come back, the Norwegians provoked the standard comment from IOC president José Samaranch: “The best Winter Games ever”. They were certainly good for Norway, who raked home ten gold medals - while Sweden won the ice hockey gold after a penalty shoot-out. Suddenly, Norway were back on top of their world, winning the events that mattered: Bjørn Dæhlie won two gold medals, Espen Bredesen and Lasse Ottesen were top two in ski jumping K90, Johann Olav Koss became Sportsman of the Year in TIME after winning three speed skating medals and awarding his prize money to Olympic Aid. Even the alpine skiers finally got some popularity, with Kjetil Aamodt, Lasse Kjus and Harald Strand Nilsen making up the top three in the combination, and the Kvitfjell and Hafjell arenas being filled up.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, this trend has continued, though a buck came in 2006 when Norway only won two golds at the Torino Games. They did, however, win 19 medals, as silvers and bronzes came aplenty. It is, however, the old sports who have renewed themselves and become popular. In this day and age, speed skating’s accessibility to the stadium crowd isn’t that important. What counts are the masses of people sitting in front of televisions - and biathlon, the old incomprehensible, has turned into the zapper’s ideal. With excellent production and a number of new competitions such as the pursuit and the mass start, and a format where the first to reach goal wins, it is ideal for television. More so than cross-country skiing, which has also turned to the first to reach goal idea: however, in biathlon, because of the shooting in between, mass fields are often broken up as the athletes get different penalties on each shooting. This allows for better television than the cross country skiing mass starts - which is 49 km of 40-50 guys looking at each other, occasionally with Romanian Zsolt Antal breaking free to lead the race in brief moments, and then the final desperate dash for the finish line.

Interestingly, cross-country skiing has been roundly criticised for its first-in-goal approach, while biathlon has been praised for it. Perhaps this is due to Norwegians having followed cross-country for so long that they had just started to get the hang of time-trial style individual starts - they were beginning to understand that if one guy started 30 seconds behind another and he’s just 20 seconds behind now, then he is in fact leading. But Norway isn’t the only market for winter sports any more - Germany, of 80 million people, most of whom have never heard of Gerhard Grimmer (1974 World Champion for DDR), are a much bigger market, and so the TV productions are streamlined for this market.

Speed skating and ski jumping have failed to revive themselves in the same way. However, ski jumping is still popular, mainly due to the still-existing Vierschanzentournee and increased popularity in Japan, Poland and the Czech Republic following the successes of Noriaki Kasai, Adam Malysz and, recently, Jakub Janda. Thus, it gets an image of more of a world sport. Speed skating, meanwhile, continues to be round-and-round the same track, at least in most people’s eyes, and consequently gets the worst viewing figures in Norway. Also, moving inside into warmer air probably alienated traditionalists who think snow, wind and weather was “all part of the game” (the aforementioned poet Vold has for the past 20 years been a fierce campaigner for the Bislett stadium being used as a speed skating arena. After Falk-Larssen’s title in 1981, it has not staged a major race).

However, they still have a most dedicated crowd, as the orange Dutch fans continue to loyally follow the skaters who have brought their nation so much glory in the 12 years since Koss retired. In those 12 years, Dutch skaters have won 10 European Championships, 9 World Championships, and countless World Cups - Norway are still struggling to realise that Eskil Ervik really isn’t that good, Øystein Grødum can never win allround because he loses four seconds on the 500 meters, and Petter Andersen is hopeless whenever you need to skate more than six laps. With the recent European Championship at Hamar running out as a fiasco due to the cooling system failing. They did manage to complete the championship inside the scheduled two days - Italian Enrico Fabris won, Italy’s first major long track speed skating title since 1992 - but it left a feeling of the Norwegian skating association as unprofessional. To boot, they are struggling with few successes, low viewing figures and little money (though more than two years ago, when no one were willing to sponsor), speed skating has dwindled to a point where only the old enthusiasts, the ones who were forever charmed by the sport in the 1960s, still follow it - while the public willingly chase the snappier, shorter, more comprehensible events in other sports.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 19th, 2006 at 10:47 am 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.