Norway’s Ulvang shows true Olympic spirit

Published 12:07 am Sunday, December 6, 2009

Each Olympics yields a guessing game as to which revered athlete will be privileged to light the Olympic Flame. My personal favorites: the archer in Barcelona who fired a flaming arrow over the stadium wall and into the cauldron; and Muhammad Ali’s slow ascension to light our fire in Atlanta.

Opening Ceremonies offer another singular honor, the recitation of the athletes’ oath, though it seldom commands much attention. That was not the case, however, at the ’94 Games in Lillehammer, Norway when Vegard Ulvang stepped forward to pledge the athletes to fair play and “the true spirit of sportsmanship.”

Ulvang was a champion Nordic skier. His cross-country victory at the ’92 Albertville Olympics gave Norway its first gold medal in 16 years in a sport that is a national obsession. An inspired Norwegian team would sweep all five men’s races and Ulvang would return home a hero — with three gold medals and a silver.

But Ulvang meant far more to Norway than the sum of his medals. He was the modern incarnation of his nation’s ancestral Viking spirit. A fearless adventurer, he had climbed the highest peaks on three continents, skied across Greenland, canoed through Siberia and ridden horseback across Outer Mongolia. When Olympic Aid wanted an athlete to travel to war-torn Sarajevo for a hospital dedication, Ulvang volunteered.

Yet none of that was on anybody’s mind in the Olympic Stadium as Ulvang spoke for the Olympians of the world. Four months earlier, Ulvang had been training in Italy when he got stunning news from home, a small iron-ore mining town some 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle. His older brother, Ketil, had disappeared while jogging home — across mountainous terrain through high winds and light snow — in the late afternoon dusk.

Ulvang raced back to join the massive search effort. And when that ended without finding a trace of his brother, Ulvang kept on looking. For three weeks, day and night, he skied the rugged countryside until all hope was exhausted. Though Ulvang had resumed training, his fans wondered if the 30-year-old would be ready, in body or spirit, to compete at this home Olympics.

Ulvang made no excuses after he finished out of contention in the two individual races that he had won in Albertville (though there was consolation when both gold medals went to younger teammates). The best hope for Ulvang to crown his sorrowful season with gold remained the 4X10 kilometer relay, the showcase event of the cross-country competition and, for most Norwegians, of the entire Olympics.

More than 200,000 people had applied for one of 31,00 seats in the Olympic stadium, where the relay would finish. Some 70,000 braved the bitter cold to line the course for occasional glimpses of skiers flying past. Though there are longer individual races, the relay appears especially grueling; the powerful sense of team obligation seems to drive the competitors beyond conventional notions of human endurance. Boston Globe columnist Bob Ryan caught the spirit of the event right when he termed it “a marathon with frostbite.”

At the Albertville Games, Norway had won the race handily — by more than 1.2 seconds — over Italy; Bjorn Daehlie, who skied the anchor leg, had time to turn and cross the finish line backwards, exulting in triumph.

In Lillehammer, the Norwegian foursome boasted three Olympic champions and a future Olympic champ and — with the home-snow and home-crowd advantage — was favored to repeat. The nation hoped a gold medal might serve as a balm for Ulvang as well as a tribute to him and his brother.

Sometimes sports plays out in fairytale fashion, but not this time. Skiing the second leg, Ulvang couldn’t hold a 10-second lead. By the anchor leg Norway was back in front, but Daehlie had Italy’s Silvio Fauner breathing down his neck. Daehlie had already won the individual 10k, while Fauner finished eighth. But on this day Daehlie simply couldn’t pull away. At one point, he even slowed down, baiting Fauner to pass and leave him in the advantageous chase position.

On the final turn, Fauner overtook Daehlie and then, in a mad dash for the finish line, held him off stride for stride to capture the gold medal. In a race lasting almost 102 minutes, the margin of victory was four-tenths of a second, the narrowest ever over six decades of Olympic competition.

After Lillehammer, Ulvang retired from competition. Four months later, his brother’s body was recovered from a lake, providing some closure to the tragedy. Four years later in Nagano, in another extraordinary Olympic duel, Norway’s relay team would avenge its defeat, edging Italy by just two-tenths of a second.

Mark Starr has been a national sports correspondent for Newsweek since 1982 and has attended 10 Olympics. Look for his columns each Sunday in The Herald leading up to the 2010 Vancouver Games.