thor hushovd
Cycling racing’s ‘God of Thunder’ is in the autumn of a highly successful career. His legacy, however, can’t be measured in results alone. Rather, in his homeland at least, it will be felt by generations to come...
Let’s assume it’s correct to call television (and before it radio) the opiate of the masses. If that’s the case then sport has delivered some of its most delirious highs. Fausto Coppi’s iconic CuneoPinerolo stage is immortal not only for what he did but also for what the radio presenter said. When Mario Ferretti informed us that, “C’è un uomo solo al comando, il suo nome è Fausto Coppi…
la sua maglia è bianco-celeste!” it quickly became part of the Italian lexicon (“There is a man in command, his name is Fausto Coppi ... his shirt is blue and white!”). Seventeen years later, Kenneth Wolstenholme’s “Some people are on the pitch… they think it’s all over… it is now!” encapsulated England’s World Cup in exactly the same way.
These two famous quotes are the ubiquitous tip of a much larger iceberg. The Norwegians, for whom winter sports have always ruled, have one very close to their hearts. When in 1981 they somehow beat England at football, commentator Bjørge Lillelien monologued his way into popular culture:
“We have beaten England 2-1 in football! It is completely unbelievable! We have beaten England, birthplace of giants! Lord Nelson, Lord Beaverbrook, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, Henry Cooper, Lady Diana… We have beaten them all. We have beaten them all. “Maggie Thatcher can you hear me? Maggie Thatcher, I have a message for you in the middle of the election campaign. I have a message for you: We have knocked England out of the football World Cup! Maggie Thatcher, as they say in your language in the boxing bars around Madison Square Garden in New York: Your boys took a hell of a beating! Your boys took a hell of a beating…”
Genius, but also a case in point. Almost no one remembers who scored the goals that night but for millions of Norwegians – and Englishmen – Lillelien’s bravura performance is indelible. It has become a seminal moment in Norwegian sporting history only because television facilitated it. Six years later (on Bastille Day to be precise) a little-known domestique named Dag Otto Lauritzen won Norway’s first Tour de France stage, prompting Channel 4 commentator Phil Liggett to quip, “Every Dag has its day.” Yet it would be almost two decades before the effect of Lauritzen’s ride – and the power of the imagery it provoked – would fully reveal itself.
Dag Otto Lauritzen grew up in Grimstad, a pretty coastal town in Southern Norway. He became a local celebrity and inspired kids to get on their bikes. One of them was the nine-year-old Thor Hushovd.
“Grimstad is a small town and when I came home in the winter, I would train with the amateurs,” says Lauritzen. “I knew Thor’s parents really well and my wife worked with his mum. Thor was a very good cross-country skier, national standard to age 16, but on a bike you could see he was something else.”
So prodigious was Hushovd’s cycling talent that when the time came to choose it wasn’t so very difficult. The boy wonder even set his sights on the Tour de France…
For most Norwegians, Johan Kaggestad is the voice of bike racing. In recent years, he and co-commentator Christian Paasche have chronicled Hushovd’s accession to global megastar for TV2 but back then his cycling life was rather more prosaic.
“I met Thor because my son, Mads, was interested in cycling as well,” says Kaggestad. “They would
do the same races, so our respective families started spending quite a lot of time together. Then Mads and Thor both went to the cycling academy in Oslo and their careers developed in parallel. They both joined the club that I was coaching, Ringerike, and I coached them for the national team as well.
“Thor was an uncomplicated sort of a kid and he hasn’t really changed. He moves through life quietly, with the same group of friends he had growing up in Grimstad. He still winters at home and he still has his old cycling friends in Norway. It’s impossible to overstate what he’s done for cycling in our country but he’d probably be the last person to articulate it.”
Kaggestad, perhaps more than anyone else, was instrumental in the cyclist Hushovd would become. Their relationship was – and remains – extremely close but it was clear that Hushovd was destined for a much bigger stage than the one Norway could afford him. By 1998 he was world U23 TT champion and a winner of both the Paris-Roubaix and Paris-Tours junior events. Little wonder that Roger Legeay’s Crédit Agricole gave him a pro contract that autumn. Little wonder too that he started winning so quickly.
It wasn’t until 2002, however, that he started to wrench the attention of the wider public. Fifteen years on from Lauritzen, the Norwegians had another winner at the Tour and a foretaste of what was to follow. From 2003 onwards, live cycling became a staple of Norway’s televisual output each July, which was a huge benefit for the federation and the industry.
Hushovd finished on the podium twice at the beginning of the 2004 Tour and, with the bonuses, became the first Norwegian ever to wear yellow. A stage win in Brittany followed and while he lost out narrowly to Robbie McEwan in the race for the maillot vert, the folks back home had the beginnings of a sporting hero. He got to wear green in Paris the following year and as his career blossomed so too did interest and participation in the sport back home.
One direct consequence of more participation is more – and better – Norwegian races. It’s no coincidence that the one-day Ringerike Grand Prix grew into the Tour of Norway, or that its import and prestige continues to grow. More impressively still, the mighty ASO have been persuaded to throw their weight behind the Arctic Race of Norway, the world’s most northerly stage race.
Race director Knud Eryk Dybdal is unequivocal about the Hushovd effect: “To measure his effect on society here you have to start by understanding two things. The first is that Norwegian winters are long and dark; the second is that we’re an outdoor people. So no one is much interested in staying home to watch TV in summer, yet Hushovd’s Tour de France performances have regularly kept ordinary Norwegians indoors. That’s quite a feat and it’s unthinkable that Norwegian cycling would have taken off as it has without him.” what goes around comes around and all big champions leave a mark. It happened with Greg LeMond in the States, with Bjarne Riis in Denmark, with Bradley Wiggins and the track team in Britain. However, Jarle Fredagsvik, one of his country’s pre-eminent cycling journalists, believes that, for all sorts of reasons, Hushovd’s true impact may take a little longer to work through. “We have a great winter sports tradition. There are cultural and historical reasons for that, along with structural ones. Our biathletes and cross-country skiers go to big championships as a team to represent our country. They always come home with three or four gold medals and there’s no way a single cyclist can top that.
“But the competition in winter sports is weaker because only a handful of countries are competing. As a nation, we don’t seem to care, though; we’re hypnotised by the medals. If we beat Germany and Austria, we’re so happy, the athletes are heroes.”
It’s undeniable that cross-country greats such as Petter Northug and Ole Einar Bjørndalen are sports deity in their homeland. A cursory glance at the roll of honour for Norwegian Sports Personality of the Year is entirely indicative of the degree to which winter sports fires the public imagination. That Hushovd’s capture of the 2010 World Championship in Australia saw him added to this very illustrious list is remarkable. In fact, given the context, it’s far more notable than the respective accessions of Messrs Cavendish and Wiggins in the UK…
History tells us that cycling has always been peripheral in Britain. However, not for nothing has the Tour visited three times, and not for nothing has the country produced a steady stream of world class riders down the years. In pre-Hushovd Norway, on the other hand, cycling was irrelevant to all but
a tiny minority. Prior to his win at the U23 Worlds 12 years ago, few Norwegians knew anything at all about the rainbow jersey. Furthermore, he won the senior version on the other side of the world, in the small hours of the Norwegian morning with a likely smaller audience. Journalist Espen Lee comments:
“Cycling is a comparably new sport to Norway, so most Norwegians have quite a naïve relationship with it. Sports which don’t revolve around the Olympics seldom catch on here and I still think many Norwegians find cycling quite foreign in many ways. The distance between Hushovd and their sporting hearts is considerable but if there’s a boom in cycling – and there is – it’s entirely down to him.
“There’s still a way to go because for most Norwegians, cycling is still just the Tour and Thor. The likes of Edvald Boasson Hagen and Alexander Kristoff aren’t as popular yet.”
Perhaps not, but then they haven’t won as much. Moreover when they do, they can expect an audience which, if not yet dyed in the wool, will at least be appreciative. While the achievements of Dag Erik Pedersen (three stages at the Giro) and Jostein Wilmann (14th at the 1980 Tour, still Norway’s best GC result) went largely unnoticed, their cycling antecedents have a genuine chance. It’s not quite a production line but the WorldTour net is being cast further north than ever before. The likes of Sondre
“for most Norwe gians, cycling is st ill just the Tour and Thor. the likes of Alexande r Krist off aren’t as popu lar yet ”
Holst Enger and Bjørn Tore Hoem have a genuine shot at it and the fact is that Hushovd was the architect – unwitting or otherwise – of the bike racing culture in which they were formed.
Kaggestad says the degree of interest is not only unprecedented but also increasing: “No other sport has ever grown like this; you’re talking about a 500 per cent increase in 10 years. So the short-term effect is more coverage, which translates into more people on bikes. That in turn creates increased funding, better coaching, more expertise, new infrastructure. That, even more than all of the great individual races that he’s won, is the real legacy of Thor Hushovd to Norwegian sport.” That’s as maybe , but one inevitably begets the other. If Geelong was the champagne moment, Hushovd’s finest hour on a bike – at least as regards pure performance – arrived the following July. Here was an 83kg sprinter-roadman, a two-time green jersey winner, taking out the stage over the giant Col d’Aubisque. As exploits go it’s probably without parallel in Tour de France history, yet he repeated the trick on another mountain stage three days later. Astonishing stuff…
The stage wins in 2011 were sensational but presaged 18 months of turmoil. He barely raced at all in 2012, his season shipwrecked by injury, illness and all manner of misfortune. He made it back last term but the niggles continued to undermine his challenge until the back end of the season. In a practical sense, Hushovd has been either unfit or absent for two spring campaigns in succession and, for all his brilliance, he still has no Monument to his name. It’s the one glaring omission in an otherwise exemplary palmarès, still more so because he’s been winning at the highest level for over a decade.
When he captured Gent-Wevelgem in 2006 he seemed a shoo-in but, though he added Het Nieuwsblad three years later, the really big one-day prizes continue to elude him. He’s finished on the podium at both Sanremo and Roubaix but for a rider of his calibre, the lower steps are probably neither here nor there. He’s 36 now and, though Roubaix certainly remains a possibility, time is fast running out. It’s a shortfall he’s painfully aware of but he’s not about to call time on it. Max Sciandri, his DS at BMC Racing, says Hushovd is as determined as ever to reach the promised land:
“He’s still extremely professional and extremely focused. Then I’d say that he’s quite a linear guy, so you don’t get major peaks and troughs in his mood. Those things translate to consistency of performance because the best cyclists are always pretty robust psychologically.
“He’s not predisposed to talk for the sake of it but when he speaks, you can be sure it’ll be relevant. Working with him has been interesting for me because it’s a different dynamic. Traditionally we’ve viewed the sports director-rider relationship as instructional; the DS is the boss and the rider by and large does what’s asked of him. With Thor it’s more of a dialogue and, if I’m honest, I’ve probably learned as much from him as vice versa.”
There’s a beautiful symmetry to Thor Hushovd’s story but also an endearing simplicity. It may be traced directly back to Bastille Day 1987 and to a little-known cyclist enjoying his day in the Pyrenean sun. It’s therefore fitting that Dag Otto Lauritzen, these days respected as much for his own TV work as for his exploit that day, be given the last word.
“People like to portray him as some kind of Viking warrior but actually he’s just a very nice human being from a very down-to-Earth family. If I helped in a small way I’m glad, and I guess he’s doing what I did but on a much bigger scale. He’s getting people out on their bikes, which can only be a good thing.”
to that….