Niklas Edin leads the Swedish curlers to Olympic victory as Skip. Actually a miracle, because his body is quite a construction site after ten surgeries in the past ten years.
It’s these really big games that Niklas Edin needs to achieve this really great form. “I’m usually completely useless in training,” says the 36-year-old. The kick is missing, this unconditional ambition to show everyone.
If Niklas Edin shows it to everyone, he’s the best curler in the world. Focused, precise, creative, strong nerves. And of course he is the Swedes’ skip, the captain whose job it is to lay down the last two stones in a game. That’s when it’s about everything. Just like on Saturday in Beijing, when Edin’s last stone literally threw the British out of the house.
Olympic champion Edin was embarrassed about curling
It wasn’t Niklas Edin’s innate desire to become a curler. As a boy he did everything: soccer, pool, tennis, athletics, table tennis. When he was 13, he happened to watch curling during the Nagano Olympics, so his mother enrolled three of his friends and him in a taster course. “I thought, guys, is that embarrassing,” says Edin. Two years later, three of the boys ended up in the Swedish curling academy.
Edin’s biggest problem was and is health. Even as a child he had problems with hernias, later there were plenty of other problems: elbows, wrists, back, knees, shoulders – and time and again hernias that had to be treated surgically. Ten surgeries in the past ten years have left their mark, tennis, football, skiing, all unthinkable. “Curling was my chance to remain an athlete,” he says.
Curling star doesn’t think
But Edin isn’t complaining, on the contrary, he’s looking for niches. Even better than curling, he plays 9-ball, a discipline of pool billiards, sometimes up to 45 hours a week. “I have to think about it,” he says, “everything is routine in curling, nothing can surprise me there, everything runs by itself.” Maybe that’s why he called out to his teammates in the final crunch time in Beijing: “Don’t think so much.”
Niklas Edin also likes to describe himself as lazy, so his biggest inspiration is his sister Sonja: “She has two children, two horses, four dogs, besides her work she studies and runs marathons. She is on the move 30 hours a day, she’s a hero.” But somehow Niklas Edin is also a kind of hero.