E.It’s dark, it’s snowing, Oslo in January 2017. No place to relax, and the shaky camera that follows the protagonist creates a tense atmosphere. A man on his way to the hospital for knee surgery. “Are you ready?” Asks the doctor. He is – as always in his career. “I try until I know it’s impossible”, he will say later in rehab: Aksel Lund Svindal, one of the best skiers of the recent past, two-time Olympic champion, five-time world champion and overall World Cup winner. Svindal’s life as a skier and person has been showing in cinemas in southern Germany since last Thursday: Munich, Nuremberg, Erlangen and Günzburg are the names of the first locations where this special film is shown. In Austria, where alpine athletes are as important as football professionals elsewhere, “Aksel” started weeks ago. The audience approval was then stopped by the lockdown. In Svindal’s home country, Norway, around 50,000 people watched in the first week, a solid rate for a country where barely more than five million people live.
“A pretty cool movie”
Actually, Aksel, as the always friendly sportsman is called by everyone, had no plans to spread his life on the big screen. But in 2015 the filmmakers Filip Christensen and Even Sigstad had the idea of accompanying him and the Norwegian ski team at the Ski World Cup. They stayed on for over four years. After “Streif – One Hell of a Ride” (directed by Gerald Salmina), the 2014 film about the “Streif” race track in Kitzbühel, “Aksel” is probably the most ambitious film about alpine ski racing to date. Christensen and Sigstad distilled 110 minutes of feature film from more than 500 hours of material – enriched with shaky videos from Aksel’s childhood and archive material from important ski races. Svindal himself thinks: “A pretty cool movie about downhill skiing”.
Above all, however, the documentation is the portrait of a man who, despite all his successes, has always remained confident and humble. One who had to deal with devastating falls that taught him humility. It is a film that triumphs and endures tragedy. This is done in a way that even less ski enthusiasts will be inspired by the fighting and team spirit of the professional. In the film, the athlete Svindal conveys that having fun in doing and the necessary friendship are just as important for success as strong will, ambition and talent: when the now thirty-eight-year-old once entered the World Cup, the Norwegians Lasse Kjus and Kjetil André Aamodt took him in your team. And although they were Svindal’s great role models, he didn’t have to serve himself up, but acted at eye level from the start. This is how Svindal later behaved to his congenial speed partner Kjetil Jansrud and the talented Aleksander Aamodt Kilde. Anyone who watches this team will get an idea of why the Norwegians have repeatedly been able to annoy the Alpine superpower Austria.
Svindal, who ended his active career in 2019, had already invested in various start-ups during his career and had long since built an existence alongside ski racing. But the way he did his sport was always a balancing act that could have ended fatally more than once. The film does not omit these moments. All the scenes in hospitals that show Svindal in the operating gown, pumped full of medication, “were definitely hard to see”. The athlete himself admits: “But if you do something, you have to do it right” – that’s why this film leaves little out of it.
In 2016 in Kitzbühel he flew out of the curve in a downhill race on the “Streif” after the Hausbergkante, which was difficult due to the weather, and landed first in the safety fence, then in the emergency room. Diagnosis: torn cruciate ligament. He did not announce the end of his career until three years later, also in Kitzbühel. He had already faced this in 2007 after a fall in Beaver Creek, Colorado. At that time he had lost a lot of blood from a deep cut after a fall; and because he fell on his back with full force, the doctors also feared internal injuries. A year later Svindal gave one of his many successful comebacks on the same slope. It wasn’t easy for him: “My whole body screamed: ‘Stop! Don’t do that! ‘”He says in the film. However, he heard a second voice whispering to him: “This is a test that you have to pass.” Svindal won the race.
And exactly one year after he confirmed to the doctor in Oslo that he was “ready” – for the operation and thus for a further extension of his skiing career – Svindal started at the Olympic Games in Pyeongchang. He won gold as an Olympic downhill champion ahead of his friend and competitor Kjetil Jansrud. It was the culmination of his career – and absolutely film-worthy.
Aksel has been in the cinema since Thursday.
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