A new film about the bespectacled plasterer from Gloucester is being billed as ‘an inspirational story’. And, for once, Hollywood has got it spot on.
The eccentric sports psychologist Willi Railo used to like to take interviewers to the top of the 90-metre high ski jump tower overlooking his home town of Oslo. Up there, the man who forged the sporting philosophy of Sven-Goran Eriksson among generations of Scandinavian winners, would smile at their jelly-kneed vertigo and make them stand at the very point of take-off. There he would ask them what they thought his words of advice would be to any jumper about to head down the vertiginous ramp into the gloaming far, far below.
“I would tell them if they had an ounce of sanity remaining in their tiny little brain they should turn round and go straight back down in the lift,” he would say. “But they are not listening. They are all mad. Quite insane.”
And you would have to be. As you stand at the top, the superstructure swaying alarmingly in the wind, the very thought of sliding off, attaining speeds of up to 70mph before flying from the end in the vain hope that you might land in a smooth open snow bowl so far away it appears to be in a different postcode, is enough to turn the most robust of stomachs.
That was the sight that greeted Michael “Eddie The Eagle” Edwards when he first climbed a 90m tower. But Edwards, who is now the subject of a major feature film starring Hugh Jackman and Christopher Walken, did not turn around. He clipped on his skis, adjusted his glasses, pulled down his goggles, 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.
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