Something had to change. A year after Calgary, the NIF founded an organization called “Olympiatoppen” with an elite sports center in Oslo. The idea behind Olympiatoppen was to have a place for the development of competence and performance culture in Norwegian elite sport that is not limited to individual sports. Everyone should benefit from it.
Since then, Norway has pooled its skills at the coaching level. The national coaches of different sports no longer have any secrets from each other, report Rasmus Lie and Sander Smørdal from TV2. “Everyone should share what they know, what they do and why they do it, so that others can benefit from it too. This probably distinguishes Norway from many other countries,” suspects Smørdal. This knowledge is then passed on to the athletes, who can then optimize their training and nutrition, among other things.
In many places, the biggest driving factor for a career in competitive sports is not knowledge, but money. The public expects that those who have made it to the top are rich. Especially in a wealthy country like Norway, you might think that the athletes receive a lot of money. The opposite is the case. “In other countries, some athletes are paid 90 percent by the state and 10 percent by sponsors. In Norway it’s the other way around,” says Ole Einar Bjørndalen.
There are scholarships, but they look more like basic security than through financing. There is no system like in Germany, in which many of the Olympians are sports soldiers. Therefore, the athletes in Norway themselves have to attract the interest of sponsors in order to be able to afford a professional career in the long term. “It’s very difficult at a young age, especially if you don’t come from a wealthy family,” explains Bjørndalen. “You have to fight your way through because you have no chance of making a living from sport. I also had to do everything myself. My parents were farmers and had little money.”