Long live the Queen

[nineveh_uk]

The world's best cross-country skier, Marit Bjørgen, has spared us* from the agony of waiting any longer, and announced that she is going to continue for at least another year. Huge cheers all round. Except possibly from Sweden.

Ed. Apparently DW (and now LJ as well) hates that photo. Photo on LJ, have a video here instead:

"Marit Bjørgen sprint GULL - VM Falun 2015" (Watch on YouTube)

*OK, in this venue, me. But also the population of Norway. Someone's even recorded a song on the subject.

**As opposed to retiring in order to have children. This is the bugger of being a woman in a sport in which people perform well in their 30s. You have to choose, year by year, one or the other, because realistically it isn't possible to step out of the highest level and come back.

Comments

[sonetka.livejournal.com]

One of the few upsides to the way gymnastics and skating are done has to be the fact that the top performers generally retire before they're old enough to legally drink alcohol (well, here anyway) and so having to choose isn't really an issue. Of course, with all the other issues surrounding those sports, I'd choose to be a skier a thousand times before I'd choose to be an Olympic gymnast.

What do the lyrics of the song mean? I'm not at home and can't upload it properly on this machine, so maybe I'm missing a translation somewhere, but I was curious.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

That is an unexpected bonus to those sports!

Unfortunately the singer comes from Trøndelag, and thus speaks a particularly incomprehensible version of Norwegian even for people whose Norwegian listening comprehension is a lot better than mine (which is very, very small), so I am only slogging very slowly through the lyrics. But basically the chorus/title means “Don’t give up [skiing]!” and it is basically “so you haven’t said yet whether you’re going to continue and you’ll decide in spring, please, please, don’t stop, you’ve achieved all these things and also there are things you haven’t done yet – like skied a notorious hill backwards, won the Tour de Ski whilst heavily pregnant.”

The ideal time career-wise for skiers to have children is really in their early twenties, after they have shown some early achievement (so they’ll get back in the team), but while they are still developing physically, technically, and tactically. Funnily enough this doesn’t seem the favoured option! Though it has been done, notably by Hilde Gjermundshaug Pedersen, who in 2006, shortly before retiring, won the national championships relay race in a team with her two teenaged daughters.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

Hilde Gjermundshaug Pedersen, who in 2006, shortly before retiring, won the national championships relay race in a team with her two teenaged daughters.

A shared enthusiasm for skiiing was probably the only way they got to spend any time together - it's not just the biology of childbearing (lots of women just pop 'em out), it's the chaos babies inflict on your life for the next few years. And the fact that, in spite of everything, you do actually like the little monsters and want to spend time with them while they're still young enough to want to spend time with you. If you all ski ferociously, it would create a lot of extra opportunities for bonding.

There was an Austrian downhill skier who carried on competing while pregnant, with no ill effects, but a few years later she was killed in a horrible fall while her little daughter was watching the race - it was burned indelibly into my memory, and I'm not even related to her. God knows what it was like for the kid. Back then, downhill skiiing was like Formula 1 pre-Nikki Lauda - death was a feature, not a bug. It's got better, but it's still horribly dangerous. At least cross-country skiiing doesn't risk orphaning the small people you risked your career to bring into the world.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

It's very tough on family life. There was an interview before the World Champs in February with a Swedish male skier saying that he hadn't seen his children for 6 weeks - since Christmas - because they had had a string of colds and stomach bugs and it had been too great a risk (even minor bugs are a disaster at a championship, and can badly derail even ordinary training). If your older kids couldn't ski you'd be doomed!

I hadn't heard that story about the downhill skier, how desperately sad. Cross-country does at least have that safety advantage.

[aunty_marion]

Good news if you're into skiing! But could you cut-tag the pic or re-size it, please? It's making my friends-page about twice as wide as normal, so it doesn't fit on-screen...

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Strange, but then my Lj is being that a bit at moment. Replaced with video, as I can't actually edit the wretched thing at work!