OT - What ever happen to... part 2

As the winter olympics draw closer, let's remind ourselves that it is not always about winning.
I'm sure some of you remember him, true olympic spirit


Whatever Happened to Eddie the Eagle, Britain’s Most Lovable Ski Jumper?

Twenty-six years after he (sort of) took to the air at the Olympics, Michael Edwards soars

By Franz Lidz
Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe
February 2014

A quarter century ago British plasterer-turned-ski jumper Michael Edwards made a name for himself—Eddie the Eagle—by not skiing or jumping very well at the Winter Olympics in Calgary. Short on talent but long on panache and derring-do, he had no illusions about his ability, no dreams of gold or silver or even bronze. Blinking myopically behind the bottle glass of his pink-and-white-rimmed glasses, he told the press: “In my case, there are only two kinds of hope—Bob Hope and no hope.”

Undeterred, Edwards sluiced on. Wearing six pairs of socks inside hand-me-down ski boots, he stepped onto the slopes, pushed off down the steep ramp and rag-dolled through the air. When he touched down, broadcasters chorused: “The Eagle has landed!” By taking a huge leap of faith, Edwards captured the world’s imagination and achieved the sort of renown that can only come overnight.

On this particular afternoon, a crowd of roughly three has massed in the driveway of Edwards’ duplex, where the Eagle has donned old ski togs. He shields his eyes from the low, fierce English sun and holds forth on his brilliant career.

“When I started competing, I was so broke that I had to tie my helmet with a piece of string,” he says. “On one jump the string snapped, and my helmet carried on farther than I did. I may have been the first ski jumper ever beaten by his gear.”

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Edwards soared over the crowd, but finished last, at the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary. (Bettman / Corbis)


An onlooker asks: “How do you like to be called? Eddie Edwards? Eddie the Eagle? Mr. Eagle?”

“Doesn’t matter,” says Edwards, smiling indulgently. “Over the past 25 years, I’ve been called all sorts of things.”

Here are a few: Fast Eddie. Slow Eddie. Crazy Eddie. Unsteady Eddie. The Flying Plasterer. Mr. Magoo on Skis. Inspector Clouseau on Skis. The Abominable Snowman. The Champion of the Underdog. The Unconquering Hero. A Lovable Loser. A Half-Blind Clot Having a Bloody Good Laugh. The Quintessential British Sportsman.

Edwards, after all, did what Englishmen do surpassingly well*—coming in gloriously, irretrievably and spectacularly last. Of the 58 jumpers in the 70-meter event, he just missed being 59th. He also brought up the rear at 90 meters, though technically he aced out three jumpers who were scratched—one of whom, a Frenchman, failed to show because he had broken a leg on a practice run the day before.

The Eagle’s career was not an unfettered ascent, or, for that matter, descent. He grew up in working-class Cheltenham, where his mother worked at an aluminum-door factory; and his father, his father’s father and his father’s father’s father were all plasterers. Eddie was a mere eaglet of 13 when he first strapped on skis during a school trip to Italy. Within four years he was racing with the British national team. Unable to afford lift tickets, he switched to the cheaper sport of ski jumping. During the summer of 1986, eighteen months before the Olympics, the 22-year-old resolved to take time off from plastering and try his luck and pluck against the world’s top jumpers.

He had no money, no coach, no equipment and no team—England had never competed in the event. Driven only by determination, he slept in his mum’s Cavalier, grubbed food out of garbage cans and once even camped out in a Finnish mental hospital. From shoveling snow to scrubbing floors, there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do to jump more. Nor was there anything that could stop him from jumping: Following one botched landing, he continued with his head tied up in a pillowcase toothache-fashion to keep a broken jaw in place.

His distances improved. Slightly. Though he shattered the unofficial British 70-meter record, it was noted that the old mark, set in the 1920s, could have been calculated with a standard tailor’s tape measure, and that the tailor himself could have leapt it.

By the time Edwards arrived in Calgary—where the Italian team gave him a new helmet and the Austrians provided his skis—he was legendary as the jumper who made it look difficult. Others flew. Only the Eagle could launch off a mountain and plummet like a dead parrot. “I was a true amateur and embodied what the Olympic spirit is all about,” he says. “To me, competing was all that mattered. Americans are very much ‘Win! Win! Win!’ In England, we don’t give a fig whether you win. It’s great if you do, but we appreciate those who don’t. The failures are the people who never get off their bums. Anyone who has a go is a success.”

The Eagle, now 50, hasn’t soared far from the nest. He lives quietly in the South Cotswolds village of Woodchester—14 miles, as the crow flies, from his native Cheltenham. He shares a modest, debris-filled home with his wife, Samantha, and their daughters Ottilie and Honey. “People who tuned in to the ’88 Winter Olympics saw me grinning and joking,” he chirps from his living room couch. “They thought, He’s laughing, he’s human.” When Edwards laughs, which he often does, he snorts through his nose. A goofy grin still lights up his bucolic face, but his Guinness glasses have been replaced by studious specs, and his great slope of a chin has been bobbed. London’s Daily Mail wrote that Edwards “has had more plastic surgery than a Nazi war criminal.”

After Calgary, Edwards didn’t do badly. There was an appearance on The Tonight Show, a huge non-victory parade in Cheltenham and a sponsorship deal with Eagle Airlines. There were Eddie the Eagle T-shirts, caps, pins and key chains. The Monster Raving Loony Party, a beyond-the-fringe political group, named Edwards its Minister for Butter Mountains. “Butter mountains” is the English term for the heaps of surplus butter stored in European countries to maintain artificial price supports. “The Loonies proposed to turn the Continent’s butter mountains into ski slopes,” Edwards explains. His lone initiative: Exempt ski jumpers from paying taxes.


http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/whatever-happened-to-eddie-eagle-britains-most-lovable-ski-jumper-180949438/

 

He is on the telly at the moment.

Next.

 

What happened to these.

http://www.cadbury.co.uk/the-story/aztec-bar-is-launched