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By Dick Dorworth

How a Seattle kid persevered and lived his dream.

Ed King is well known among Sun Valley locals as the only African-American ski instructor in the history of the resort. Considered by most ski historians as the birthplace and role model of American destination ski resorts, Sun Valley built its ski school around European-trained managers, who seemed to have been uninterested in the diversity of skiing talent on hand in its major market, Seattle.

Photo above by David N. Seelig, courtesy Idaho Mountain Express

The few years King was a member of the Sun Valley Ski School are a small but significant part of his enormous contribution to American ski instruction and culture. The Seattle native began skiing in 1958 at age 11, after meeting Jim and Hans Anderson and their father, Hercules, in the YMCA swimming program. The Andersons, the best known among the few African-American skiing families in Washington at the time, invited King to Stevens Pass. “I took my first lesson and was hooked,” he recalls. “I told my Mom I was going to be a great skier. She replied, ‘We don’t have that kind of money.’ I replied that I will earn it, which I did.”

King was unintimidated by this Scandinavian sport. He came from a family of pioneers. His mother, Marjorie Pitter King, ran a successful accounting business and was the first African-American woman to hold state office in Washington. His aunt Maxine Hayes, after being denied entry to the nursing program at the University of Washington (UW), got her degree in New York; she then integrated the staff at Seattle’s Providence Hospital and became a professor of nursing at UW and Seattle Pacific University. His aunt Constance Thomas was the first African-American teacher in the Seattle Public Schools.

PTA Ski School, Seattle Ski Club

Seattle’s Parent Teacher Association (PTA) ran its own weekend ski program, and for several years King rode the PTA buses to Snoqualmie Pass. For three years he took lessons from the Japanese-American instructor Fred Hirai, and by the time King was in high school, he was a strong skier—strong enough that ski school director Hal Kihlman took the kid under his wing.

After attending ethnically diverse high schools (Garfield High in Seattle and Los Angeles High), King graduated in 1964 and headed to UW. Needing work to pay tuition, he taught swimming and diving for the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department and became a pool manager. In 1966, against some pushback from the resort owner, Kihlman hired him as a full-time ski instructor. A year later, King became the first Black member of the Seattle Ski Club. “I will never forget when Kihlman, Dan Coughlin and Keith Boender went to bat for me,” King says. “I remember them telling me it was quite a voting session!”

PSIA Certification and Sun Valley

King earned his full Professional Ski Instructors of America (PSIA) certification in 1968, and he may have been the first Black full cert. Kihlman contacted Sun Valley Ski School director Sigi Engl to recommend King as an instructor. Engl agreed to hire him. (Kihlman had neglected to mention King’s skin pigmentation.) Kihlman also introduced King to the late Gordy Butterfield, the rep for Head skis in Sun Valley. Butterfield, beloved in the ski industry and father of the accomplished ski photographer and historian David, invited King to live in his Sun Valley home while he tried out for the ski school.

King recalls the first ski school meeting he attended: “Gordy and I sat along the back wall. Sigi explained how we would be breaking into our clinic groups. It was the ’60s and I remember him saying in a certain room of the inn they would have the Head ski, which was the ‘Black Power’ ski, and in another room they had the [Kneissl] White Star, which was the ‘White Power’ ski. I turned to Gordy and asked, ‘What happened to the Hart Javelin?’ The Javelin was integrated: a white ski with a black stripe down the middle.”

King enjoyed a week of clinics with Don Reinhart, one of the founders of PSIA. He was then told to be available and meet every morning at the bus turn-around, where Engl made all of the teaching assignments. As King relates, “I showed up every day but was never asked to teach. It was difficult watching others with lesser or no experience being chosen. I kept a positive attitude, thanked Gordy for his hospitality and generosity, and returned to the Northwest. Two years later I returned to Sun Valley and again went through the process and again made myself available every day, but I was denied the opportunity to teach. This time it was quite painful, but I did not let it show. I knew I was a good instructor, but I was never given a chance.”

 

Photo by Dick Dorworth,
courtesy Idaho Mountain
Express

 

Ski School Founder, Director

Returning to UW, King majored in recreational planning and administration with a minor in art. During his final year, in 1972, he was offered a job at Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, as associate director for leisure education programs. He took the job and graduated from Evergreen, where he worked and played handball with the legendary climber/philosopher/teacher Willy Unsoeld. He also developed programs and workshops in the arts for local communities.

King launched a PSIA-accredited ski school for Evergreen, supporting some students with financial aid through the Federal Work-Study Program. The school leased equipment at special rates from local ski shops, and Crystal’s Col. Ed Link came through with discount lift tickets. Wini Jones at Roffe helped with ski school uniforms and student skiwear. King invited the Grays Harbor YMCA to participate and began running buses from there and from Olympia and Tacoma to Crystal Mountain for lessons on Wednesdays and Sundays.

“Through this program we were able to provide an opportunity for students of African-American, Asian, Native American and Hispanic backgrounds the opportunity to experience skiing,” King says. “The ski program also offered an outdoor educational credit.”

Over the next 25 years, while running arts programs, King worked as an instructor, ski school supervisor, technical director and director. Meanwhile, he launched a successful photography business, built a pottery studio and helped to manage Seattle’s annual Bumbershoot Arts Festival. King was also hired by several corporations for special photography projects.

Sun Valley Redeemed

But he never lost his original dream of teaching skiing in Sun Valley. In 1995 he moved there with Eleanor, his wife since 1969, and let it be known that he wanted to teach skiing. In 1998, ski school director Hans Muehlegger and ex-director Rainer Kolb invited King to join the ski school. King said at the time, “It has been a very positive and enjoyable experience, and I thank Kolb and Muehlegger and all of the ski school for bringing me into the family. It is where I belong.” Muehlegger later hired another Black ski instructor, a British fellow who returned to Europe after one winter. King remains the sole African-American instructor to have worked at Sun Valley.

In 2005 the Kings left Ketchum for Spokane Valley, Washington. For a few years they returned to Sun Valley each winter, and King continued to teach with the Sun Valley Ski School. Then he joined the ski school at Silver Mountain in Kellogg, Idaho, as technical director—it was five hours closer than Sun Valley. But after more than 60 years of skiing, his knees needed some attention. He arranged knee replacement surgery, which was postponed by Covid. While waiting for new knees, King is busy running his photography business.

Of his skiing career, King says, “Sometimes dreams do come true. Many might take this for granted. I do not.” He adds, “If the entire world skied together, it would be a happier place. The happiest place on earth is the ski slope.” 

Veteran racer, coach and author Dick Dorworth most recently reviewed Skiing Sun Valley in the July-August 2021 issue of Skiing History.

 

 

 

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In January 1968, Skiing Magazine ran this profile, written by John Jerome, of Ed Scott, founder of Scott USA.

Ed Scott may be the most humorous man I’ve ever met. Yet I don’t believe I ever saw him really break up in laughter. Rather, he’ll pursue a line of conversation in a direction that amuses him, and he’ll pause, turn his wide-eyed spectacles full upon you, and you’ll notice his upper lip twitch slightly. That’s all. If you haven’t broken up yourself by that point, you’d do well to re-examine the past two or three minutes of conversation—because Scotty has just cracked some tremendous private joke, and it would be worthwhile to figure out what it was.

Among the things he thinks are funny are most of the big shots in skiing, international racing and its convoluted internecine wars, international ski business and its convoluted internecine wars, his own business efforts, life in the Sun Valley area, life, and himself. Among the things he is dead serious about are—well, just read that list again...

Ed Scott
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At the Nagano Olympics, he was stripped of snowboarding’s first gold medal. The next day, he had the medal back. Today, Ross Rebagliati is a successful marijuana entrepreneur in British Columbia. By Michel Beaudry

I wouldn’t change a thing,” says Canadian snowboard legend Ross Rebagliati. Owner of one of the most notorious gold medals in Winter Games history, the happily married father of three insists he long ago made peace with his past. “Sure, it hurt when it happened,” he admits. “It totally changed my life. But it also provided new opportunities for me and my family.”

Today the 46-year-old is a successful medical marijuana entrepreneur in British Columbia’s bucolic Okanagan Valley (use of marijuana for medicinal purposes has been legal in Canada since 2001, and the country plans to legalize the drug for recreational use in the summer of 2018). His dispensary is called Ross’ Gold. It’s a play on words, but also a reflection of where he wants to take his company. “My Olympic story makes up a big part of our storefront,” he explains. “Every day I bring my medal out and put it on display. I guess you could say I’m on a bit of a mission: I want our products, our brand, to set the gold standard in the business.”

And yet “it was a deeply traumatic experience,” concedes the former Whistler resident of his Olympic trials. “Especially since it didn’t need to happen. I’d never felt the full weight of negative media before. It was overwhelming.”

Anyone who followed the Winter Games that year can’t help but remember Ross’ story. It was February 1998, and snowboarding was poised to join the Olympic family in Nagano, Japan. The giant slalom had been scheduled for the first day and the field was stacked. “They’d watered down the course the night before,” remembers Ross. “And the hill was perfect—firm enough to set a good edge, but soft enough to hold your line.”

Race day dawned sunny and clear. But the first run did not go entirely to plan for the young Canadian. “I made two or three big mistakes that nearly stopped me in my tracks,” he confesses. “But to my surprise I was still among the top eight, barely a tenth [of a second] from first place.” 

Throwing caution to the wind, Ross charged the second run like a man possessed. “By the time I reached the breakover and the steep part of the course, I was flying,” he says. “I remember barely being able to change my edge before hitting the next gate.” 

His aggression paid off. In one of the most exciting giant slalom finishes in Olympic history, Rebagliati bagged the gold by the slimmest of margins. Says Ross: “I remember watching the Winter Games as a kid and daydreaming about standing on the top step of the podium…and it was happening for real. I had to pinch myself.”

His euphoria would be short-lived. During a routine drug test, a trace of THC, the active component in cannabis, was detected in Rebagliati’s post-race urine sample. It was a miniscule amount (less than 18 nanograms per millitre) but it was enough to convince the IOC brass to set the disqualification process in motion.

“I didn’t have a clue,” insists Ross. “We’d been warned by our coaches about the drug-testing protocol and I’d stayed away from weed for months.” Still, he hadn’t quite cut himself off from the culture. “All my Whistler friends indulged, but they respected my decision. I still hung out with them. I just didn’t toke with them.”

Picture the scene: “It’s the next morning and I’m hanging out with a few teammates in my room,” he begins. “Our race is done. Our Olympic contest is over. We’re all looking forward to becoming Games tourists now.” 

Suddenly two coaches appear at Rebagliati’s door. “Sit down, Ross,” says one. 

“I knew immediately it was about my drug test,” he says. “I was sure it had something to do with weed.”

The next few hours passed in a blur. First he was driven from the relative calm of Shiga Kogen Resort to IOC headquarters in Nagano and the already-alerted press. It was the first big Olympic story and the media was in a feeding frenzy. “The whole Canadian Mission Team staff was there,” he remembers. “They formed a circle around me and tried to get me inside. People were screaming questions at me. Accusing me of all sorts of things. I felt like I had betrayed my country. I was in shock, emotional, ashamed.” 

But worse was yet to come. While his case was being argued in the IOC court of arbitration, Ross was arrested by the Japanese police and charged with importing an illegal substance. “It was surreal,” says Ross. As he sat in his Nagano cell, the devastated snowboarder played back the events of the last 24 hours. How could this have happened? 

And then everything changed. In what can only be described as a scene from the theatre of the absurd, it was revealed during another round of court hearings that THC wasn’t on the IOC’s banned list after all. “So the lawyers told me: ‘You’re good to go’,” says Ross. “The next day I boarded a flight to LA for an appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. I mean, talk about a turnaround. Still, I was really angry. I’d spent time in jail, me, the gold medal winner. And all for nothing.”  

After the Nagano Games, the IOC did place THC on the banned drug list. The legal limit was set at 30ng/ml. The level in Ross’ urine in the 1998 sample was half that amount.

Meanwhile, the fallout from his wrongful disqualification continued to haunt his life. 

 “My homecoming was marked by a big party in the Whistler town center,” he says. “The place was packed. I should have been on cloud nine.” And yet the 26-year-old couldn’t fully enjoy the celebration. “I was still feeling guilty…like my Olympic performance was tarnished somehow.”

That nagging sense of unease increasingly shut him off from his friends and family. Ross says he didn’t leave his Whistler condo for weeks. “I was afraid to answer the door even for the pizza delivery guy,” he remembers. “The media had branded me as the ‘stoner snowboarder who won the gold.’ But that wasn’t me.” 

Rebagliati eventually overcame his demons and got back on his snowboard…only to find that his status had changed. “My legacy was badly damaged by the Internet,” he says. “I lost sponsors, lost supporters. After 9-11, I was even put on the U.S. no-fly list and told I wasn’t welcome in America anymore. It had major consequences. Suddenly I couldn’t compete at events like the X-Games. My snowboarding career was done.”   

So Ross moved on with his life. He’d made some good moves early in Whistler’s booming real estate market and was now reaping the financial benefits from those investments. He got married, had a child, and in 2006 moved east to Kelowna in BC’s Okanagan Valley. It looked like the still-boyish champion had turned things around for himself. 

But there were more bumps in the road. His marriage broke apart. Some business deals soured. Things just weren’t working out. So he returned to Whistler in 2010 and started questioning himself all over again. What could he do, he wondered, to finally bring closure to his still-troubled Olympic saga? And then it came to him.

Snowboarding’s first Olympic gold medalist launched his medical marijuana dispensary, Ross’ Gold, with partner Patrick Smyth in January 2013. The media picked up on it immediately. Over the next few months, he and his company were profiled in USA Today, the Huffington Post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and the Toronto Star. By 2015, his branded glassware and products could be found in nearly a hundred stores across Canada. And when the Liberals promised to legalize pot during that year’s federal election, Ross was quick to jump on their bandwagon. 

“We opened our first storefront in Kelowna in December 2016,” he says. “And now we’re looking to acquire, or pair up with, a local vineyard.”

“I probably wouldn’t be in the marijuana business today if I hadn’t lived the experience I did in Nagano,” he adds. “But I certainly wasn’t forced down this road.” 

 

Married again, back in Kelowna and now the father of three children—Ryan, 8, Rosie, 5, and Rocco, 2—Ross feels like he’s finally found his place. “I want to feel good about being an Olympic champion. And with Ross’ Gold I can do that. I see it on my customers’ faces every day: my story does make a difference to their lives. And that makes me truly happy. As I said before, I wouldn’t change a thing.”  

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Jake Hoeschler of the US Ski Team and University of Colorado, interviewed by ISHA's Seth Masia, on StoryCorps. Recorded by Kat Haber.

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After losing his sight, Jean Eymere became an advocate for outdoor sports for blind people…and an icon on the Aspen slopes. By John Sabella
 
When the glitterati of contemporary Aspen drive north on Mill Street, perhaps en route to this or that Red Mountain mansion, they pass an odd block of marble in the corner of Rio Grande Park, across from Clark’s Market. Few if any take time to study the half-formed figure emerging from the rock, and perhaps fewer still know the name Jean Eymere. What a difference half a century makes. 
 
In 1968, Aspen hosted its first-ever World Cup race. A year later, the U.S. and French national ski teams held a dual meet on Little Nell featuring the head-tohead racing format devised by former U.S. Alpine Team Coach Bob Beattie. At each event, the big star in everybody’s mind was of course Jean-Claude Killy, fresh off his triple Olympic gold medal triumph in Grenoble. 
 
In those years, visiting racers were billeted at local ski lodges and family homes and the issue of who would host Killy became a hot topic among Aspenites. Local lodge owner and Frenchman Jean Eymere was adamant that only he should have the privilege of receiving his countryman at his Coachlight Chalet, and took his case to the City Council where he prevailed. 
 
Even after a disappointing third-place finish in the downhill and a missed podium in the slalom in 1968, in gratitude for the hospitality of a countryman, Killy gave his host a dazzling red ski outfit, stunning in an era of basic black skiwear, and perhaps the first pair of mirrored Vuarnet sunglasses ever to make its way to the Roaring Fork Valley. 
 
Eymere, a ski instructor at Aspen Highlands at the time, had suffered from diabetes since childhood in the French Alps. His sight began deteriorating at a young age and the impact of clearing a mogul as he descended toward the Highlands base several years after Killy’s visit triggered diabetic retinopathy and instant blindness. Having recently relocated to a small ranch in Carbondale, 30 miles downvalley from Aspen, Eymere struggled to the bottom of the mountain and caught a ride home, where he wallowed in depression until several of his ski instructor buddies packed him in the car with his ski equipment, drove him back up valley and insisted he hit the slopes again. Protesting all the while, Eymere reluctantly gave skiing another go, and the group conceived a system in which a sighted guide following close on the ski tails of the blind man called signals: left, right, left, left, right, stop. 
 
Later, I guided him many times and as long as he had my voice constantly barking reassurance, Eymere skied effortlessly. If I went silent, he immediately skidded to a stop for fear that his “eyes” had deserted him. 
 
Eymere and his guides became a common sight on the slopes of Aspen ski hills, the Frenchman unmistakable in Killy’s spectacular red suit and Vuarnets, wearing a Blind Skier bib on his chest. The concept of a blind outdoor athlete, a skier no less, was revolutionary at the time and sighted skiers swarmed around the Frenchman to marvel at his undertaking. 
 
Eymere reveled in the attention, especially the flattery of admiring females. He accepted every invitation for an après-ski drink and often leaned close to me to inquire in a conspiratorial whisper, “She eez good looking, zees one next to me?” His exploits became the inspiration for the Blind Outdoor Leisure Development (BOLD) program that opened the doors in the United States for the blind to participate in countless activities that had always been denied them. 
 
The transition from treating the blind as shut-ins to appreciating their athletic potential wasn’t entirely smooth. Raised in the Haute Savoie near Chamonix, Eymere had been a skier since early childhood, a racer as a young man and a ski instructor. “You could do it because you already knew how,” critics told Eymere when he tried to promote the notion of blind outdoor recreation. “It would be a different story if you had tried a sport that was entirely new to you.” 
 
Confronted with that challenge, Eymere took up figure skating at the Aspen Ice Rink across the street from the Coachlight and became a competitive skater. Later, using a vaulting pole borrowed from the Aspen High School track team, Eymere and sighted guides climbed the 13,000-foot Mt. Sopris that loomed across the valley from the Frenchman’s Carbondale ranch: Eymere grasped the middle of the pole with a guide at either end. Later, Eymere and his team summited even more formidable Pyramid Peak. 
 
Eymere became a true, homegrown Aspen celebrity, regularly marching with his guide dog and “Blind Skier” bib in the annual Winterskol Parades in January. After the novelty of seeing a blind skier had worn off among the locals, Eymere modified his bib to read “Blind Hunter” and marched with a shotgun over his shoulder. 
 
A silversmith by trade, the sightless Eymere became an enthusiastic craftsman, adorning every door and window in the Coachlight with gingerbread trim he cut with a band saw, relying on the wind from the whirling blade against an exposed forefinger that traced the edge of a pattern. When he ushered me into his workshop to show me the procedure, I stumbled through pitch-black darkness until the blind man realized my predicament and turned on the rarely used overhead light. The sudden illumination revealed what to me appeared to be complete chaos but I quickly discovered that Eymere knew the location of every item in the clutter, relying on a system that depended on touch rather than sight. A moment later while the Frenchman chattered away, I winced as the band saw tore through an inch-thick board with the blade whirring a fraction of an inch from his finger. 
 
Eymere went on to become an accomplished furniture builder, crafting the chairs and tables at the Coachlight as well as the altar chair for his church, before taking up marble sculpture. His friends procured discarded blocks of stone from the abandoned quarry in nearby Marble, Colorado and Eymere set to work wielding a pneumatic chisel and the same air-against-the-fingertip technique he used with power saws. With a sensibility bordering on the baroque and a taste for gingerbread, the blind man’s first effort was a classical representation of a nymph bending forward at the edge of a lake. Roughly the size of a shoebox, the piece was finely detailed; something any sighted sculptor not named Rodin could be proud of. 
 
Encouraged, Eymere dispatched his teamsters to retrieve a massive block of marble, taller than a man, and set out to conceive his masterpiece: a climber clinging to a sheer cliff and reaching for the summit of the mountain. It was a metaphor for the Frenchman’s tireless quest to overcome his own disability. On summer afternoons as I pulled into his driveway, I’d see him standing on a stepladder, blasting away at the rock as a shower of marble dust rained over him. Whenever he recognized the sound of my car, he descended the ladder, turned and stuck out his hand with a hearty, “Hi John, nice to see you,” as I struggled to suppress my laughter. From head to toe, including the surface of the prized Vuarnets, Eymere was plastered with a thick coat of white. 
 
I could clearly see the shape of the climber emerging from the rock and I have no doubt it would have been as finely executed as the nymph if diabetes hadn’t killed Eymere at age 43 in 1979. In tribute to the Frenchman, the City Council of four decades ago placed the statue in Rio Grande Park where it stands today, as contemporary Aspenites pass by bewildered by the misshapen rock and oblivious to the story of its genesis.
Jean Eymere
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By Paul J. MacArthur

HARRACHOV, Czech Republic (March 10, 2011) — A 47-year-old ski jumper stands atop a HS-40 ski jumping hill. His body isn’t what it used to be, abused by thousands of jumps and landings and a seemingly lifelong battle with alcohol. Still, he’s hopeful. The Finnish legend, whose likeness has appeared on his country’s postage stamps, has given up the bottle, been training hard, and believes he may be peaking for this competition. He proceeds to jump 34 and 36.5 meters. His longest jump on that hill is less than 20 percent of his former world record, but it’s good enough. Matti Nykänen, arguably the greatest ski jumper ever to step into a pair of boots, has won the gold medal at the Unofficial World Championship of Veterans.

Born on July 17, 1963, in Jyväskylä, Finland, Nykänen was eight years old when his father dared him to try a ski jump near the family home. Matti obliged and ski jumping quickly became an obsession. “The only thing I wanted was to jump,” Nykänen says in Matti: The Biography of Matti Nykänen by Egon Theiner. “And to jump, and to jump again.” On March 19, 1974, Nykänen entered his first contest, on a small eight-meter hill, and took first place in his age group. 

By the 1975­–76 season, Nykänen was jumping from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day of the week. The ski jumping hill in Jyväskylä had a chairlift and floodlight, allowing him to put in more jumps per day than rivals who lived elsewhere. Theiner credits this local advantage, Nykänen’s singular focus on ski jumping, and new training techniques developed by Nykänen’s coach, Matti Pulli, such as having his jumpers wear weight vests, for the Finn’s future success in the sport. There were also many subtle technical aspects to Nykänen’s jumps that enabled him to fly farther than anyone else.

Nykänen’s domination of the ski jumping world began on February 11, 1981, when he took home gold at the FIS Junior World Championships. He claimed his first victory in a World Cup competition on December 30, 1981 and his first World Cup title in 1983. At the 1984 Olympic Games in Sarajevo, Nykänen won gold on the large hill and silver on the normal hill. His 17.5-point margin of victory on the large hill remains the largest in Olympic history. “No one could really touch him, it seemed,” says former competitive ski jumper Michael Collins. “He was definitely the guy you looked to, you watched for technique, because he did stuff no one else did.”

In March 1984, Nykänen broke the ski jumping distance record twice at Oberstdorf, Germany. He repeated that feat in 1985 while becoming the first person to clear the 190-meter barrier with a 191-meter jump. He also took home the World Ski Flying Championship in the process. Nykänen added more World Cup titles to his collection in 1985, 1986 and 1988. At the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary, he became the first ski jumper to score three gold medals in a single Olympic competition as he won the normal hill by 17 points, the large hill by 16.5 points, and led Finland to gold in the team event. On the large hill, 23 percent of Nykänen’s flight was beyond the K-point, a record in the parallel style era. 

By the time Nykänen retired, he’d rewritten the ski jumping record book in his own image with five Olympic medals, 46 World Cup victories, four Olympic gold medals (since tied by Simon Ammann), three individual Olympic gold medals (since passed by Ammann), four World Cup gold medals (since tied by Adam Malysz) and 76 World Cup podium appearances (since passed by Janne Ahonen and Malysz). “He was kind of a savant," says former USSA ski jumping coach Larry Stone. “He couldn’t tell you what he was doing, but he was absolutely the best in the world by so much for those years…He was a genius. Absolute genius.”

Flying high and falling far

Nykänen, however, possessed an Achilles heel: alcohol. The ski jumper started drinking when he was 14. By the mid 1980s, drinking was having negative impacts on his behavior and, occasionally, his performance. Fights, breaking windows with his bare hands, lockups in police holding tanks, drunken interviews, being sent home early from competitions—they were all part of a perpetual Nykänen hangover.

“They tried everything with Nykänen,” Stone says of the superstar’s coaches. “They made him take pills that would make him violently nauseous when he would take a drink. For every athlete that’s a wild man, you’ve got to find a balance that doesn’t destroy what makes them great, but by the same token try to keep them from destroying themselves. And sometimes you find that there’s no way.”

Alcohol abuse combined with the cumulative effects of injuries fueled Nykänen’s competitive decline. By 1991 the last great star of the parallel era was finished, but retirement didn’t calm him. Lacking an outlet for his hyperactivity, Nykänen did not adjust to post ski jumping life well and became even wilder. “I changed from a well-known system into a phase of insecurity,” Nykänen says in the biography Matti. “For all my life I had been doing something else and now that did not matter any longer … The world away from ski jumps was absolutely different from the one I knew so far.”

A stint as a pop singer in the early 1990s had a promising start, but soon fizzled. Financial problems quickly befell Nykänen, who peaked before big time prize and sponsor money was part of the ski jumping circuit. To deal with various debts, he reportedly bartered his gold medals, worked for a phone sex line and stripped at a Järvenpää casino. Nykänen’s been married five times, twice to millionaire sausage heiress Mervi Tapola, with whom he’s had a stormy relationship that has involved fights, restraining orders and more than a dozen filings for divorce.

Nykänen’s alcohol induced rages have led to brawls, knifings and domestic violence. He’s been incarcerated on several occasions, including a 13-month sentence in 2004 for stabbing a friend in a drunken brawl. Less than five days after his release on that charge, Nykänen was in prison again, this time for assaulting Tapola. “He’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Theiner says. “When sober, he’s one of the nicest and friendliest people I've ever met. When drunk, he’s dangerous and aggressive.”  

A return to the senior circuit and an International Masters Championship victory in February 2008 did not solve Nykänen’s problems. He was arrested again in December 2009, when, in yet another drunken rage, he reportedly drew a knife on Tapola and tried to strangle her with a bathrobe belt on Christmas Day. In August 2010, he was sentenced to 16 months in prison. The decision was recently upheld by the Court of Appeals, and at press time, he was appealing the sentence to the Supreme Court.

Still, there may be hope. The most recent reports about Nykänen are positive. He’s engaged to Susanna Ruotsalainen, a brand manager who gained some notoriety appearing on the Finnish version of The Apprentice.  Reportedly, Ruotsalainen has helped Nykänen give up alcohol and live a healthier lifestyle; his recent success on the veterans circuit being one sign of his healthy living. Nykänen also restarted his on again off again singing career and continues to make more positive headlines in Finland. The wedding between the two celebrities, however, has been postponed due to Nykänen’s legal issues.

“It won't last,” says Theiner of Nykänen’s new leaf. “Nobody can deal with the phenomenon Nykänen forever. And when you give him the possibility, he will drink and fight again.” 

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