By Alexander Lisetz for Red Bulletin
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.
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.
Svindal switches off his laptop and turns on the TV. We're sitting on the couch in his hotel room, a situation for which his passion for skiing is to blame. As it's the day before the new season gets underway in Solden, in the Austrian Tyrol, you'd think there'd be a million and one things he could do now to keep his head clear, but he'd rather watch the women's race on TV. "Exciting, isn't it?" he offers, after each split, or he takes a sharp intake of breath, or asks, "Do you see how Zettel's not putting the same weight on each leg? You can tell she's not fully over her injury yet." (Kathrin Zettel nevertheless finished second in the giant slalom.)
Watching a race on TV with Svindal is almost as entertaining as watching Svindal race on TV. His German is so good that he can make fun of the commentators' slips of the tongue and their general banter. No detail escapes his analytical gaze. His enthusiasm is infectious. Even so, being both a star and a fan of skiing hasn't given him tunnel vision. His list of other interests is almost as long as his list of skiing achievements. "Aksel is eerily intelligent," says Rudi Huber, racing manager of Atomic Skis, Svindal's supplier. He has something worth saying on almost any subject. International politics? "Obama's Nobelprize came a bit too soon." Business? "I recently held a management workshop on working as a team and motivation." Entertainment? "I never miss Travis Pastrana's Nitro Circus." The economic crisis? "Human psychology is to blame. If it weren't for the panicky reactions of many investors, the effects wouldn't have been half as bad." Music? "Thunder Road is Springsteen's best work. "There are things which are more important than making a good turn in the giant slalom," he adds, "but when you're actually doing it, nothing is."
Svindal is a mature 26-year-old, and his maturity has been hard-won. He likes to be nice to the world, even if the world hasn't always been nice to him. His mother, Ina, died when he was just eight. He later took her maiden name, Lund, as his middle name. "Her loss affects me to this day, even if I'm not that willing to think about how." It has also made his relationship with his father, Bjorn, all the closer.
"I've learned a bloody lot from him," Svindal says. "About people, about sport, about business." (Svindal likes the word ‘bloody' when he's looking for a superlative.) Bjorn, 60, is a passionate skier and, according to his boy, a "bloody clever guy" who accompanies Svindal to important races and meetings with sponsors and business partners.
Svindal is also close to his brother Simen, two years his junior. Simen was a ski-racer himself; aged three, he learned to ski on Svindal's skis and later on the two would compete in their first races together.
Another knock to Svindal's inner development came when he fell heavily during training in Beaver Creek, Colorado, in November 2007. He lost 17kg of muscle during his recovery, but not a single gram of morale; the following year he came back stronger than ever. "As a top sportsman," Svindal explains, "you learn to listen to your body very precisely." This is how he wins his constant battle with physical performance, fitness and health.
"Eventually you start noticing even the tiniest change or impairment." But then sometimes you have to ignore what the body is telling you, like at that last race of last season in Are, Sweden, where Svindal stole the World Cup away from Benjamin Raich despite running a 40-degree fever. "I went straight from bed to the slope, without doing a warm-up. Your body gives 150 per cent at times like those. I was in bed for a week afterwards."
Twenty-four hours before the first race of the 2010 World Cup season, again Svindal's body isn't doing what Svindal's head would like it to do. He is wearing a thick bandage around his left knee and he bears with composure the pain that any rash movement brings about. In front of journalists, he plays down any bother from this cartilage damage. In private, with his advisers, there's talk of missing the race. "I'd have no problem on a smooth piste, but if I took any knocks..." he says, grimacing.
Next day, he takes precisely the kind of painful knock he feared, during the second giant slalom run, ceding victory to Didier Cuche and booking himself a trip to the surgeon. Safe to assume that, after his op, he'll go hell-fire after the competition...and no one he beats will resent him for it.
Originally published in the Red Bulletin here
