Built for speed An interview with Lasse Kjus, double Olympic champion. ”My body is my workplace”, says 29-year-old Norwegian Lasse Kjus, possibly the fastest man alive. As workplaces go, this one is not a protected environment. ”It seems bent on betrying me.” Last season, Lasse Kjus swept clean. He took the overall World Cup by a nice margin, as he did in 1996. In last winter´s World Championship in Vail, Colorado, Kjus earned medals in all five disciplines — downhill, slalom, giant slalom, Super G and the downhill/slalom combination. Two gold and three silver medals in one fell swoop, a totally unprecedented achievement. In 1999, Lasse Kjus brought the Alpine skiing crown home to Norway, where they invented the damn thing anyway. Soft-spoken and instantly likeable, Lasse Kjus does not have the appearance of being crowned by anyone. He´s rather like a shy kid trapped in a B-movie body. Mean is what he looks like. When we meet in a photo studio in Oslo, Lasse has just had his head shaved — there are no precious fractions of seconds to be gained by this, as he wisely wears a helmet to work — and sets this off with half-a-week´s growth of dark beard. He´s wearing a black, Rocky-style knit cap and a bum length leather jacket with new, pre-crumpled grey trousers of a fashionably bad fit. In fact, with his heavy hands, wide shoulders and quite visible flab, he resembles a heavyweight prizefighter going a bit soft. Or maybe just a blue-collar criminal. In his Audi, which is still pristine — but more about Lasse´s car calamities later — we listen to The Buena Vista Social Club and start discussing When We Were Kings, the classic documentary about the 1974 Muhammad Ali/George Foreman fight in Zaïre. I just saw it the night before, and it turns out to be one of Kjus´ favourites as well. «Ali, boma yé!» he intones, («Ali, kill him!» in Congolese), the catchphrase from the film, and it suddenly becomes quite possible to imagine him in the ring. Except he´d be slaughtered. His right punch is useless, for one thing. «I took a bad fall during practice in Chile in 1991,» he says. «A nerve to the deltoid was damaged in my right shoulder, and even today, that shoulder is practically useless.» He gets up from behind a huge sandwich filled mainly with bean sprouts, and points out the difference. The right shoulder is visibly smaller, being almost devoid of muscles. He also demonstrates how far back he can bend his right elbow; not a lot. The fastest man alive is virtually a cripple. «When that happened, I of course thought my career was finished. Then I found ways of avoiding the problem by using different muscles, but, as I say, my body is a treacherous thing. It makes me paranoid, that´s the way I feel about it.» At five foot eleven and nearly two hundred pounds, Lasse Kjus contradicts the image of the streamlined, modern athlete. The ski season has already started, and isn´t that a pot belly we´re seeing? «Yeah. Well, you need to be heavy to get the velocity. It´s a basic law of physics, really. But I´ve noticed it makes people feel good when they notice how plump we are, me and Kjetil. (Kjetil A. Aamodt, Lasse´s rival and buddy, so close for so many years he´s even been dubbed his «girlfriend».) I view myself as kind of an ambassador in the struggle against eating disorders.» You don´t count your calories? «Nope. I enjoy my food, and lots of it. I stay in hotels a lot, and five months a year in hotels will make anyone a food critic. Norwegian hotels usually have horrible food. The ones in Austria are good, and in the German part of Switzerland. When you cross to the French part, the prices rise, the portions dwindle, and you get really mediocre French cooking.» Lasse Kjus was never meant to be a gourmet, or a world celebrity for that matter. He grew up in Siggerud, a tiny suburban settlement a few miles south of Oslo («A hole in the ground, basically,» he describes it). His parents were working class, but these days run their own company making software for integrating PCs and digital switchboards. Lasse claims to have an interest in computers and the Internet as well, but his personal website (www.lasse-kjus.com) can´t be described as the most impressive around. At school he was «uninterested, mediocre, and ptobably not the nicest boy in the class». In fact, he admits to having been quite a school bully. It appears Lasse had no self respect whatsoever, until he as a teenager discovered what he could do better than anyone else: Risk his life in a crazily slanting slope, at speeds forbidden to automobiles in most countries. Although his success is largely due to the fact that Lasse competes in all the Alpine disciplines — not many do — it is downhill, the fastest and most dangerous of them all, that is his real strength. Does he think he´s found himself a sensible job? «I think nobody loves life the as much as a downhill skier crossing the finish line,» he says. «You really feel you´re alive. Of course, I know it´s dangerous — deadly dangerous. You have to have total respect for the speed, and the difficulty — never do anything foolhardy, never allow yourself to panic. The only way to prevent fear, is to be thoroughly prepared. «Think of it as you would before giving a lecture. Preparation is everything, of course, to know the track. You have to be completely focused. Relaxed, but fully aware, and not the slightest bit tense. And then it should all happen in your body. There is no way to force it, to cut corners, once you realize it´s not working. Then you might get killed. Got it?» Very Zen, I suppose. But downhill finals are won by as little as one twentieth of a second. In Lasse´s present state of being, comfortably seated in a café, he couldn´t possibly recall his own name in that interval. Can he possibly feel that time when racing? «Actuqlly, I do. I’m aware it seems like ridiculously small margins when viewed on TV, for instance. But I can feel that twentieth of a second in my body. Or rather, I have a visual image of the distance — I know when I´m supposed to be where.» (To get some measure: At 120 km/t, which is approximately top speed for downhill racers, one twentieth of a second represents 1,6666666667 meters. Hardly the length of his skis.) And afterwards? «Depends on the outcome, of course. If you fuck up, there´s a lot of aggression, which might be used for positive purposes or just be plain destructive. Winning is intoxicating; you get an incredible energy boost, you´re just up there flying. The guys I travel with can be pretty rowdy. We party hard at times.» You couldn´t really say Norwegians like skiing. It´s practically a religion. It´s perfectly acceptable to skip work whenever a two-hour competition is being broadcast, like Muslims getting time off to pray. Turn on your TV any night of the season, and there is some barely literate ski champion talking excruciatingly slow on a talk show. Visit a store to buy a loaf of bread, and it´s hard to find one without a skier´s signature and/or portrait, endorsing the product for being healthy, energy-rich and nearly as digestable as concrete. When cross-country ski god Bjørn Dæhlie had to go into surgery to correct a back problem last autumn, the main evening newscast devoted top slot and seven minutes to the event, with flashbacks of his triumphs. This writer tuned in late, and figured the man must at least have been the victim of a terrorist attack. The sports Norwegians win, mainly winter sports and — recently — a bit of football, are viewed as political tools as well. It is widely believed that when Norway wins an Olympic medal, the rest of the world will develop an instant craving to buy Norwegian products, or visit the country to drink the most expensive beer in the world. Savvy politicians take care to be seen at major sports events, and the current Prime Minister is so football-crazed, he allegedly once timed an official visit to Spain to coincide with his hometown team playing Real Madrid in the Champions League. Here´s the catch, however — only cross-country skiing is considered real skiing. Though facing a lot tougher competition, Lasse Kjus and his buddy Kjetil André Aamodt are comparatively unsung heroes. No seven minutes of live missile crisis-style TV coverage, should these guys break a leg — or a back, as they well might do. This is all the more puzzling when you consider the history of Alpine skiing. «Slalom» is a Norwegian word. The whole thing supposedly started in mid-nineteenth century, at a place called Morgedal in central Norway. But somehow the style, which means «skiing» to almost every citizen of the world, got usurped by the mid-Europeans, mainly the Austrians, Swiss and Germans. In short, Norway didn´t win. Lasse laughs. «They couldn´t cope with the fixed heel,» he says. «They just had to have loose ones.» «Myself, I enjoy a cross-country trip at Easter time, if the weather´s nice. But I could never see myself compete in that fashion. I´ve got a copletely different temperament.» Which might just be the crux of the matter. While the sinewy, appallingly clean-cut heroes of the cross-country track embody some of the most revered Norwegian values — patriotism, perseverance, asceticism, perfect health and cool rationality — Kjus and his breed are somewhat tainted by irreverence and madness. It´s almost like Lasse´s workplace — his body — has the classic sign hanging around somewhere: «You don´t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps.» «The system never gave me a chance to be good at sports,» he says. «When I started to take skiing seriously, I was trained by Finn Aamodt, Kjetil André´s father. One of the most important things he taught me, was not to respect my opponents. Disrespecting the competition is all-important — the hell with those guys!» Norwegian athletes are almost required by law to be die-hard patriots. Are you? «Well, I´m not a very happy tax payer, for one thing. I don´t know why I haven´t moved somewhere more financially reasonable yet. But I guess it´s possible to love your country, even though you hate it. One thing that makes me hate Norway, is the way we´re supposed to think the country´s so rich. I don´t see that. The services we pay for are actually pretty lousy. «It also pisses me off the way Norway seems to be preoccupied with impressing the world, at whatever cost. I really would like to feel that I represent my country when racing, but usually I don´t. There is no patriotism involved. I feel I´m part of something, but the context always changes — it´s either the team, my buddies, the nation, I don´t know.» So how do you feel when you recieve that congratulatory telegram from the Prime Minister? «Well, he has no part to claim in what I achieve. I´ve always been outside of the system. I come from a working class family, and I´ve never learnt anything but what I want, I have to struggle for. I never got a break from the system, from the whole establishment set up to help people who want to succeed in sports. Nothing.» And the sports bureaucracy in Norway is immense, supporting a great many non-participants. Money on sports are spent like crazy. Recently, it was revealed that there are about 500 active ski jumpers in the country, who have the benefit of 650 ski jumps, most of them floodlit. «By ´the establishment´ I mainly mean the National Ski Association, which is like a family, a clique. There are too many parasites, people who seek personal power. Sports unhappily seem to attract that sort of people. To me, this actually destroys the joy of sports. The snowboarders have elected to stay outside the organization, and to me this represents something healthy.» Today, Lasse Kjus is the establishment, whether he likes it or not. He claims not to know what he earned last year, but an estimate would put him at the very top of Norwegian athletes in terms of income. Undisputably, he got away with the most prize money in Alpine skiing last season. And then there´s sponsorship. Car sponsors, for instance. Ketil Aamodt claims that if you go to an Opel dealership and mention Lasse´s name, you´ll not even be allowed to buy an Opel. He´s supposed to have wrecked eight of them. «It´s quite a sad story with Opel, actually. The deal didn´t turn out as agreed. I wasn´t allowed to keep the car, or pick the model I wanted, but was lent eight different demo models in the space of a year. I decided to treat them gently, but wasn´t lucky at all.» One of them ended on the roof and was totalled, the story goes. «But I was really determined to return the last Opel in mint condition. The front fender was just a tiny bit dented, until the very day before delivery. Then I got lost driving somewhere, and I was too busy sorting out where to go to see that delivery truck coming ... when the car got back to Opel, it was full of loose parts ... doors and everything.» A perfect gentleman, Lasse offers to drive me home after terminating the interview. Picking up speed in one of the tunnels connecting East and West central Oslo, he starts confiding that his rough way with automobiles might be somewhat connected with one hobby of his, which is race car driving. Someone is going dreadfully slow in the lane ahead. Somehow, I resist the temptation to shout: Lasse, boma yé!! END COMMENT (in Norwegian): Innlegg i Dagbladet feb. 2000, for å oppsummere Lasse Kjus-skandalen.