What’s so great about skiing? Who’s channelling Michael Jackson on a glacier? And who’s to blame for the financial crisis? Champion skier Aksel Lund Svindal has the answers to these questions, and so much more…
It’s almost as hard to dislike Aksel Lund Svindal as it is to beat him in a ski race. This is how one encounter pans out: Svindal lies on an unmade bed in his hotel room – a colourful collage of skiwear, half-read Jo Nesbø crime novels and carefully arranged socks – and opens a video file on his laptop. In shot are Svindal and three team-mates on a snowy peak somewhere in the Chilean Andes, kitted out in racesuits, helmets and ski boots. The four begin a performance, fit for the stage, in which they dance along to Michael Jackson’s Beat It: “You wanna be tough,” they lunge, “better do what you can,” arms in the air, “just beat it,” and turn.
The video, which they made for a laugh during the Norwegian ski team’s autumn training, is a minor hit on YouTube and elsewhere online. “My website,” Svindal says, “has never had so many hits.”
There are plenty more moments like this that make perhaps the world’s best skier perhaps the world’s best-liked skier. Svindal has managed to combine the single-mindedness of the top sports star with the unaffected charm of everyone’s best friend.
'You can come down a slope on skis faster than you can in anything with an engine' – Aksel Lund Svindal
His rivals are powerless against both. Svindal is “the “nicest person I know”, says Didier Cuche of Switzerland. According to Austria’s Benjamin Raich, he’s a “super guy” – this, from the man from whom Svindal snatched the lead, in the very last race of the season, in the 2009 World Cup (Svindal had done the same to Raich in 2007).
Alongside his three World Championship golds and four World Cup titles in separate disciplines, these are his greatest successes. The secret behind them, the thing that has taken him so far, is as old-school as it is simple: he’s mad about skiing.
The fact that you can “come down a slope on skis faster than you can in anything with an engine”, is what makes the sport so fascinating to this 189cm (6ft 2in), 98kg (15st 6lb) man-mountain. He also loves “the moment you cross the finishing line and look at the scoreboard and realise you’ve skied the fastest time. That feeling’s better than anything in the award ceremony.”
But Svindal’s love of skiing isn’t just stimulated by slalom gates and split times. “In the summer, some friends and I shot a freestyle skiing video in the Canadian backcountry,” he explains. It shows Svindal on a fairly vertical deep-snow downhill. At one point he pulls off a 30m jump over a cliff. “It’d probably be better if my coach didn’t see the video,” he adds.
Read more of this article in this month’s Red Bulletin magazine, available to read on-screen or download as a pdf at the Red Bulletin archive.
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