The most famous athlete at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics finished last in both of his events, and the gap was not close. Michael Edwards — Eddie to everyone, and within days "Eddie the Eagle" to the world — was a 24-year-old plasterer from Cheltenham who had become, essentially by default, the first ski jumper ever to represent Great Britain at an Olympics in living memory. There were no British rivals to beat for the place because there were no other British ski jumpers. There was also no funding, no coach worth the name and no infrastructure: Britain does not have a single full-size ski jump.
Edwards was not a fantasist who wandered in off the street. He was a genuinely good skier who had narrowly missed Britain's alpine team for Sarajevo 1984, then switched to jumping while living in Lake Placid because it was the only route to an Olympics he could afford. The economics were brutal. He trained while broke, at one point reportedly lodging in a Finnish mental hospital because it was the cheapest bed available, scrounging equipment as he went: boots too big, worn with several pairs of socks, and a helmet said to be tied on with string. At around 82 kilograms he was some nine kilos heavier than his nearest competitor, a serious penalty in a sport that is mostly applied physics. And he was profoundly short-sighted, jumping in thick glasses under his goggles that fogged at altitude — meaning the man dropping off a 90-metre tower could not always see where he was going.
Calgary falls in love
In Calgary he finished 58th of 58 in the 70-metre event and 55th (last, after two withdrawals) in the 90-metre, in which his 71 metres nonetheless set a British record. The Finnish master Matti Nykänen won both individual golds and a third with the team — the actual sporting story of the hill — but the press conferences belonged to Edwards. The crowds chanted his name; television could not get enough of the pudding-faced man in milk-bottle glasses who celebrated every safe landing like a victory, because for him it was. Serious ski-jumping nations were unamused, muttering that he made the sport look like a stunt. The public disagreed, loudly.
The seal came at the closing ceremony, when the president of the organising committee, Frank King, told the assembled athletes that some had won gold, some had broken records — "and some of you have even soared like an eagle". It was the first time an individual athlete had been singled out in an Olympic closing address. Edwards flew home to a hero's reception, thousands at the airport, chat shows, sponsorship, a novelty single; he later recorded songs in Finnish, a language he did not speak, and for a while earned more in an hour of appearances than he had in a year of plastering.
The rule with his name on it
The Olympic establishment drew the opposite conclusion. In 1990 the International Olympic Committee and winter federations brought in an entry standard promptly nicknamed the "Eddie the Eagle Rule": to qualify, Olympic hopefuls in such events had to place in roughly the top 30 per cent of international competitors, or the top 50, whichever was fewer. Edwards tried repeatedly to reach Albertville, Lillehammer and Nagano, and the rule named after him kept him out every time. Whether it protected athletes' safety or merely the sport's dignity is still argued; what is certain is that the Games legislated specifically against their own most popular participant.
The afterlife has been long and oddly cheerful. Edwards was declared bankrupt in the 1990s after a trust holding his earnings failed, retrained, and completed a law degree. In 2016 the feature film "Eddie the Eagle", with Taron Egerton as Edwards and Hugh Jackman as an invented, hard-drinking American coach, introduced him to a generation born after Calgary — heavily fictionalised, as Edwards genially points out, but true to the central fact: he really did go from a Gloucestershire building site to an Olympic 90-metre tower in under three years. He remains the standard case in the debate the Olympics has never resolved — whether the Games exist for the world's best, or for the world's most determined. For two weeks in 1988, at least, the answer was the man who came last.
Quiz nuggets
- Eddie Edwards, a plasterer from Cheltenham, was Britain's first Olympic ski jumper of the modern era at Calgary 1988.
- He finished last in both events — 58th in the 70m and 55th in the 90m — where his 71-metre jump set a British record.
- Severely short-sighted, he jumped in glasses under his goggles that fogged, and was about 9kg heavier than any rival.
- Organising committee president Frank King saluted him in the closing ceremony: some athletes had "soared like an eagle".
- The 1990 "Eddie the Eagle Rule" imposed qualifying standards that kept Edwards out of every subsequent Olympics; Matti Nykänen won three golds at Calgary.