Sport Jim White
EDDIE THE EAGLE
The single most terrifying place of work I have ever encountered was the top of a ninety-metre ski-jump tower, glowering way above Oslo. I was taken there by the eccentric Norwegian sports psychologist Willi Railo. Jelly-kneed with vertigo as the structure swayed in the wind, I asked Railo what words of advice he would give to any jumper about to slide down into the gloaming.
‘I would tell them, if they have an ounce of sanity, they should turn round and go straight back down in the lift,’ he said. This was the sight that greeted Michael ‘Eddie the Eagle’ Edwards when he first climbed a ninety-metre tower: enough to reduce the sturdiest of folk to a gibbering wreck. Edwards, though, did not, as I did, turn round and go back down in the lift. He clipped on his skis, pulled down his goggles, thrust out his jaw, slid off and flew. And the thing was, the first time he went up a tower of that scale was not when conducting an interview with a Norwegian psychologist. It was to compete at the Olympic Games.
Thirty years on from his Olympic jump, Edwards is these days recalled largely as a joke figure, with his bottlebottomed spectacles, sizeable underbite and porn-star moustache (captured in the 2016 film Eddie the Eagle). But the truth is what he did at Calgary in February 1988 remains a strong candidate for the bravest single act in British sporting history. And, as the latest edition of the Games revs up in Korea, it is appropriate to remind ourselves quite how astonishing his audacity was.
Edwards was a Gloucestershire plasterer with a lifelong ambition to compete in the Olympics. When he discovered that the entry requirement for the ski jump was ludicrously lax, he reckoned that was his best chance. So, financing himself, he entered the European circuit and, less than two years after taking up the sport, managed the necessary distance to qualify as the first and only British representative ever to compete at the Olympic ski jump. The thing was, since he had spent his time leaping from the smaller seventy-metre height, his debut at ninety metres was when he arrived in Canada. No wonder he seized the world’s attention.
Mind you, at the time there were many – and loud – dissenting voices. His fellow competitors nicknamed him Mr Magoo; the East Germans dismissed him as a clown and claimed his presence was debasing the sport (unlike their own industrial use of pharmaceuticals). The organisers tried to ban him for fear he would do himself real harm. Such gripes did not stop his star ascending. Never mind that he finished so far behind the rest of the field that they required binoculars to spot his score; the world went temporarily Eddie-mad. The night after his final jump, he was flown firstclass to New York to appear on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. So huge was he that a crowd of 10,000 gathered at Heathrow to welcome him; he was trapped inside a minibus for hours, desperate to go to the lavatory.
As the British team heads to Pyeongchang, to look back at Eddie is to be reminded of how things have changed. He was a self-starter, without the backing of even a coach; in many ways, his sacrifice, bravery and determination to test himself against the best fulfilled the ethical purpose of the Olympics. Baron de Coubertin’s words – ‘The most important thing is not the victory but the struggle’ – have long since been lost in the primped, preened and pumped-up world of international competition. Edwards epitomised the moral value of trying even if success is impossible – a proper hero. And the most disappointing thing about his legacy is that the tightening of the rules which followed his involvement mean we will never see his like again.