Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Jonas was just old enough to be able to start competing, so he bought a juvenile discus weighing 1 kilo and a junior discus weighing 1.5 kilos, both made by Karhu, which means ‘bear’ in Finnish — this was before the marvellous French Obol brand came on the market — so he called them the Little Bear and the Great Bear. Jonas practised on his own at Grorud sports ground when there weren’t too many people around and took part in a few meets, including the Tyrving Games no less, although he didn’t do very well. But he watched the others closely, picked up a few training tips by keeping his ears open, learned a few pointers, to the stage where he could at least get the discus to spin in the right direction by delivering it from his index finger and not, as he had done to begin with, by releasing the steel rim with his pinkie. ‘Remember to let the discus be friends with time,’ he heard somebody say. ‘It has to spin clockwise.’

Is it possible to fight a dragon and win?

The pleasure he got out of the throwing simply grew and grew. If truth be told, this was his favourite pastime in those days: to nip over to Grorud sports ground at dusk and practise a few discus throws, chasing that magic moment, the seconds when everything fell into place — the moment when even the aerodynamic forces were on his side. He would spend hours there, working on the rhythm and balance that had to be developed; strove to be as keyed-up but at the same time as relaxed as possible, jumped for joy when he got it right, threw it in such a way that he felt the torque in every fibre of his body — because that is what it was like: a good throw always felt like such a tremendous release. To Jonas, these sessions at Grorud sports ground, the monomaniacal repetition of the same throw, were like a battle against gravity itself — if, that is, he was not endeavouring to defy another powerful, natural law: that of ordinariness. Whatever the case, he always came home purged.

It was on just such an evening that it happened. Jonas was alone on the field, poised on the concrete circle and throwing towards the fence in the top corner of the ground to save having to walk so far to retrieve the discus. In his head he was the young Alfred Oerter. Al Oerter who had already won three Olympic Golds in succession and would go on to take a fourth, an unbelievable sporting achievement. Jonas Wergeland was Al Oerter, up in the corner, hurling the discus with such force that it sang triumphantly off the wire fence. He also did a lot of ‘dry’ throws, practised his coordination, his torsion, his footwork and the drive forward; it was almost like ballet. With the legs, the challenge lay not just in getting the balance right but in achieving one smooth, continuous movement. ‘You mustn’t stop, not even when you’re driving forward,’ he had overheard one experienced thrower tell a younger pupil. ‘You have to keep your feet pivoting so that you don’t lose speed, remember, speed is essential!’ And so Jonas spent a lot of time just practising the pivot, it was a bit like a pirouette; even in the schoolyard he would catch himself doing it, to the great amusement of the other kids. ‘Look at Jonas, he thinks he’s Sonja Henie!’

At one meet he got talking to an old trainer who taught him a number of secrets: which is to say, the way he, the old trainer, saw the challenges of discus throwing at that time. Above all, what Jonas learned from him was a lesson in technique; he realized that he had to start his turn low down, begin his pivot with the right knee and not with his arms and upper body as a novice would automatically do. An accelerating tempo was also vital. ‘You have to start gently,’ the trainer told him. ‘Most folk uncoil too fast and that makes it harder to accelerate.’ The actual delivery had to be made at maximum speed. The thrust had to be like a spark, giving the disc a final, crucial boost.

So there he was, on this lovely, mild afternoon in late summer, trying out these new theories; enjoying every throw, feeling that it was going better and better, the spiralling turn and the outward trajectory; soon, any minute now, he was going to beat his own record of close on thirty metres. Because that was his goal: to outdo himself. That was reward enough; he didn’t need an audience.

That, however, was just what he was about to get. Oddvar Kvalheim — no relation, it should be said, to the Kvalheim Brothers, the idols of every boy runner — but the chairman, nonetheless, of the Grorud Sports Club’s athletics division, was approaching. Not on foot either, but driving in his spanking new Mercedes — ‘I’ve got myself a Spanish fancy woman,’ he would joke — a well-deserved reward for many years of hard slog, building up his own small business. Anyway, there was Kvalheim, no mean triple-jumper himself in his day, bowling along Trondheimsveien, and just about to turn in at Sigvartsen’s Bakery and Rygge’s hardware store, the stalwart local distributor of G-MAN saws, and drive through the gate closest to the ski-jump hill, right next to the corner where Jonas was throwing.

Jonas stood in the concrete circle, swaying loosely from side to side, with the pleasant weight of the discus, wood and metal, in his right hand: stood there swinging, trying to find his rhythm, thinking as he did so that he had melded the best of his mother and his father, ironmongery and music, then he set about preparing himself mentally for the throw, because he knew he had to become one with the discus, that a good throw was effortless — every Taoist knows that, Viktor would tell him later — it never worked if he gripped the discus too hard, he had to ‘ram it’ perfectly, this was the time when he was going to do it, he thought, there was something about the air, the light, the tingling inside him; he spat on the discus, passed it from hand to hand before switching to an easy swing of his discus arm, and as he was starting on the actual rotation, engrossed in the hypnotic process of twisting himself into another dimension, Chairman Kvalheim — in the dimension of the real world — was only a second outside his field of vision, but Jonas did not hear the purr of the Mercedes engine; all his concentration was focused on spinning his body round in a circle, one and half turns, at the same time driving forwards in the ring and sending the discus into a skyward trajectory; and maybe it was because he did, after all, hear an unfamiliar sound, the Mercedes’ wheels on gravel, that he threw ‘out’, as often happens, and to the right of the planned throwing sector — as is quite natural if one is right-handed — but it was still a magnificent throw, he got a tremendous momentum on the disc — all at once the wind was very much in his favour — Jonas saw the discus skimming away, farther than he had ever thrown it before, because that’s always the way with a good throw, they travel so very, very slowly, you can follow the course of the disc all the way, you fly through the air with the disc, as if it also carries with it a hope, the longing to break away completely.

And just at that moment Chairman Kvalheim turned the corner and drove his new Mercedes into the ditch, no real damage done, but nonetheless he was in the ditch, because Oddvar Kvalheim had not been watching Jonas Wergeland, he had been running an eye over the ski-jump hill, thinking to himself, a mite tetchily, that somebody jolly well ought to get that tidied up before the winter, when he spotted something which made him forget all about the winter and the ski-jump hill and, for a second, lose control of the car, because there, straight ahead of him, clear as could be, even with the sun in his eyes, was a flying saucer, hovering there, low on the horizon; he saw it quite plainly, for a long time, it seemed to him, although it was, in fact, only a couple of seconds, it swooped gracefully through the air, and then it was gone. ‘No flaming wonder I drove into the ditch,’ he said later in concluding a story he would tell again and again for years, not least because for a few minutes it made him the centre of attention.