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Outside magazine, February 1999
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1 2 3 

Adjustment in Midflight (cont.)

Terje Haakonsen
Terje Haakonsen (Frank W. Ockenfels)
Haakonsen's shadow in his sport is such that when he chooses not to participate in an event, this nonparticipation becomes the noteworthy aspect of that event. After he blew off the Olympics last year (comparing International Olympic Committee chairman Juan Antonio Samaranch to Al Capone and labeling the IOC "ski nazis" along the way), he was accused of orchestrating a boycott and, by his Norwegian countrymen, of being unpatriotic. But no one could deny that Haakonsen's nonparticipation in the first Olympics in which snowboarding was an official sport threw into doubt the validity of the entire Olympic half-pipe event.

"There were so many reasons not to be a part of the Olympics," Haakonsen says, sitting on the red velvet seat of an Oslo subway car as he travels from downtown to his loft in the tony Frogner neighborhood of Oslo. "I didn't want to make a big deal about that, but the newspapers did. It's not like I was waving the flag, 'Fuck the Olympics.' I was just not a part of it."

The train glides forward with Scandinavian efficiency. The seats, the floor, the windows are spotless, the people—fair, clear skin, ruddy good health, determined expressions—spotless. Haakonsen, shaking his head, explains the Olympic controversy as an ironic by-product of his actually trying to support his sport. "I don't want to do an event if the event is shitty. The only reason to do it would be for the
More Athletes
Kelly Slater

Dan Osman

Terje Haakonsen

Bobby Julich & Kevin Livingston

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Hermann Maier

Guilherme Tamega

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Jonny Moseley

Lance Armstrong

[more]

good of the sport. But the Olympic Committee put the ski federation in charge of snowboarding. And at the Olympics, the way they did it, the way they made it look, they set the sport back years." He's referring to the competition taking place in a driving rainstorm, with a strict two-run routine that discouraged innovation and encouraged half-pipe restraint—all the result, Haakonsen believes, of skiers rather than snowboarders making the decisions.

Even so, the cattier boarders on the Tour suggest Haakonsen didn't sweat the Olympics because of the possibility that he might lose, a disastrous potentiality that far outweighed any glory that might have come from Winning One for Norway. (Quick: Remember who did win the gold? Case closed.)

"Say he shows up and he wins. Then what?" asks veteran boarder Dave Downing. "He's already the best in the world. Why should he bother?" The one absolute way Haakonsen had of remaining the world's ne-plus-ultra boarder was to spend the Games lolling in Hawaii, which he did. "Every snowboarder who came to the Olympics basically knew he was battling it out for second," says Line.

On the subway, in the tidy bowels of Oslo, no such debate about Olympic altruism interferes with the sheen of Haakonsen's fame. Aside from a couple of soccer players, Haakonsen is Norway's most famous international athlete. Heads turn and follow; people are sure they know him, but many are not sure how, exactly. He's important, though, that's obvious: Just look at the rude-boy slouch, the hands jammed deep into the pockets of a black Burton jacket. Give him goggles, boots, and a snowboard and he would come immediately into focus: Terje! This is, after all, a country half of which is north of the Arctic Circle, where what we call winter sports are known simply as sports. And a Norwegian world champ—even a controversial, occasionally coasting, slightly confused 24-year-old legend—well, he's still the champ.

An image from Haakonsen's memory: Moving from Sørøya, an island in the north of Norway, to Åmot, the Telemark village where he grew up; arctic summer, light the whole drive down from Sørøya to Åmot, five-year-old Terje in the back seat of a 244 Volvo sedan. Haakonsen recalls pulling up in front of a big lawn bisected by a long driveway leading to a small wooden house. That winter he built his first ski jump in the backyard, a pile of snow he used to catch air off while riding a pair of plastic miniskis. He and his brother taught themselves to do 360s, prototricks through which Haakonsen learned some of the fundamentals of how to stay balanced while soaring through the air.

In a remarkable video produced by Volcom, Subjekt Haakonsen—Life and Times of Sprocking Cat, there is a grainy Super-8 sequence in which a five-year-old Haakonsen runs carrying a soccer ball over his head, flips himself using the ball as a fulcrum against the grass, catches some air, and then, when he's back on his feet, uses the forward momentum to toss the ball overhand about 30 yards—a display of astonishing attributes, the most obvious being the phenomenal coordination of a five-year-old able to perform this acrobatic maneuver. But even more impressive is the understanding of the physics of the body as it moves through space—the awareness that each action will create additional energy that can be harnessed to perform another move. This is the principle behind a snowboarder's stringing tricks together, evolving his own skills, pushing a fakey ollie so that it eventually becomes a caballerial and then mutates into an upside-down caballerial—what's known as the Haakonflip.

Though Haakonsen claims neither his father nor his mother was a gifted athlete, he remembers how his father, a chef, used to drop by the field where Haakonsen played soccer with his friends. Wearing a wool sweater, tight-fitting jeans, and work boots, Per Haakonsen would routinely outrun the sneaker-clad athletes training on the track circling the field. Haakonsen inherited that speed, that natural athleticism, first while playing soccer—the sport that remains, along with surfing and, of course, snowboarding, his favorite pastime. Playing for his village against other local villages, Haakonsen was a dominant midfielder, the player who scored most of his team's goals. "I always wondered how far I could go in soccer," he says. "That question remains, if I could have played at the highest levels."


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