Jan Boklöv - The most expensive skier ever

In 1985 in Falun in Sweden a mistake was made that would forever change the sport of ski jumping, and costing millions of dollars doing so. Episode 2 explores the fascinating story of anti-hero Jan Boklöv and how his struggles to be accepted with his new style of ski jumping ended up forever changing the sport. 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

“I jump, and the judges judge”

Hey there, and welcome back to Ski Heroes! My name is Eivind, and  today is Sunday July 31st 2022 as I’m recording Episode 2 from the ski lodge in Houston, TX, the skiing capital of the world. This has been an extremely hot summer in Houston so far, with record heat for the past couple of months. Today we’re at 97 degrees F/36C and it feels like a luxury compared to the 100+F we’ve had lately. Very little reminds me of cold weather and skiing right now in other words, but maybe for that reason is why it’s been quite refreshing to work on Ski Heroes for the past several weeks and let my mind escape to a much colder place at least for a while.  

I want to say thank you to everyone who listened to the first episode about Sondre Norheim, and a special thank you to those who provided excellent feedback on it. Podcasting is a whole new thing for me and I’m kinda figuring it out as I go. I therefore really appreciate any input and feedback you have, good bad or ugly. 

The previous episode was set in the 1800s, back when it all started. I felt this was a logical place to also start the podcast. But it was also a bit challenging to put the story together as there was very little concrete and accurate information available, and even very credible sources like books or museum articles were largely based on word-of-mouth stories as very little of the infor,ation was actually documented.

For this second episode I therefore wanted to move up quite a bit in time and highlight a story that I am personally quite familiar with, and also one that has had an impact on my own life. Although it’s a long time ago now, I was an active ski jumper for about 10 years throughout the 1990s. My dad was also a ski jumper, and I think it is safe to say that I got into the sport through him. My biggest childhood heroes were ski jumpers and although I was never very successful at the sport myself I have always been obsessed with it ever since I was a kid. And the story we’re covering today is super fascinating as it changed everything in the sport of ski jumping. It took place in the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, which is when it also affected my own practice of ski jumping. And by now many of you have probably already guessed, if you haven’t already cheated and looked in the episode description, that the next ski hero is Jan Boklov. So pun intended, let’s jump into it!

Jan Bokloev. This red headed, Pentecostal, epileptic Swedish ski jumper with a stutter and a day job as a daycare teacher is the least likely hero you can come across, more of an antihero really. And when Jan Boklov forever changed the sport of ski jumping in the late 1980s it was fitting that it was a result of making a mistake. Just like the discovery of penicillin happened by a mistake, or champagne for that matter. Ski jumping, once the national pastime in many countries like Norway, Finland, Germany, Poland, and Austria, is not that big of a sport as it used to be anymore. And in Sweden it never really has been either. 

Jan Boklov was born in 1966 in the Swedish town with the wonderful name Koskullskulle. A tiny village with less than 1000 people located in the very north of Sweden. There was no play ground for kids in Koskullskulle so the local ski jumping hill became the playground for young Jan Bokloev and the other kids in town. Jan was not really very good at ski jumping, nor was he necessarily that talented either. But he stuck with it as he grew up and as a teenager he decided to go for it and pursue ski jumping at a serious level, a big decision considering that at the time he had not yet made much of a name for himself at all.  Ski jumping is a sport you can practice both in the summer and winter time anymore. In the winter of course you jump on snow, but in the summer you can jump on plastic mats that cover the hill. And it was during a summer training camp in 1985 in Falun in Sweden that the 19 year old Jan Boklov made his mistake. A mistake that would forever change the sport of ski jumping. And a mistake that would end up costing millions of dollars. More on that one later. 

As the sport of ski jumping evolved from the days of Sondre Norheim, who we covered in the previous episode, and throughout 18 and 1900s, various jumping styles and techniques came and went. Honestly, in all disciplines of skiing I don’t think there’s a sport that’s seen more innovation on technique than ski jumping. The nature of the sport, the constant pursuit of longer and longer jumps, has forced constant innovation among the ski jumpers. The one who would find a new technique would gain an edge and often dominate the sport. However, if the jumper settled down and stopped innovating he would quickly become obsolete unless he continued to further develop his style. And I say his style, because for the longest time it was only the boys who were allowed to do jump and compete. Ski jumping, more so than any other sport, is plagued by one-hit-wonders: jumpers who excel and dominate for one season, but who never manage to retain their superiority and dominate for multiple seasons in a row. Some of this may come from the highly technical aspect of ski jumping: the movement and decisions you make within a split second at the take off will have a huge impact on how far you fly, and the slightest deviation from the “optimal” technique will result in significantly shorter distances. So it could be that some jumpers have it right for one season, and then never manage to quite find back to that same feeling or technique in future seasons. Another explanation may be that your competitive edge, should you have one in either equipment or in technique, really just last one season because by the next year many of your competitors have caught up to you. Whatever the explanation, only a handful of jumpers have truly managed to dominate the sport for many seasons in a row. 

So let’s get technical for a minute, because ski jumping is very technical! In the early days, the ski jumper would stand straight up in the air on top of his skis. Throughout the 1930s the ski jumpers from Kongsberg in Norway, lead by the magnificent Ruud brothers, developed the Kongsberger technique, where the jumpers legs would be fairly straight up, but where they would lean their upper body forward with a sharp bend at the hips to reduce air resistance and thereby achieving longer distances. Throughout the 1950s the Finns developed the style of leaning the entire body forward over the skis for even further aerodynamic optimization and longer jumps. This is the first time when we see a style that is at least somewhat similar to the style used today. In 1980s several jumpers started to use a style where both skis were put out to one side and the jumper would glide through the air in a semi-sideways manner, further reducing air-drag and achieving longer jumps. The jumper’s arms have been kept out to the side, forward, and backward in the air. But as much as the technique and style has changed on top of the skis, the one common denominator for all of these style and technique improvements has been that the skis were always parallel to one another. As we learned in the previous episode, the very first ski jumping competition was held in 1866, and for the next 119 years, never once did a jumper think to do anything other than keeping the skis parallel in the air. But in 1985 that was about to change. 

The conditions in Falun were windy this day, as they often are there as Jan Boklov was getting ready for his practice jump. If you watch ski jumping regularly, or even if you just watch it during the Olympics, you know that there are two main hill sizes, the normal hill, or 90 meter hill as it’s also referred to, and the large hill or the 120 meter hill as it can also be called. And during the summer of 1985 Jan Boklov was practicing in the normal 90 meter hill. Most ski jumpers will tell you that they usually land at a similar distance each time they jump, and I can personally really relate to this. Obviously fluctuating by a few meters one way or the other, but if you’re a guy who usually land at, say 80 meters in a 90 meter hill, you’ll find it disappointing if you land at 60 meters, and you’d also find it surprising if you land at, say 95 or a 100 meters all of a sudden. In the 90 meter hill in Falun, Jan Boklov would usually land around the 70 meter mark. But during this particular jump in the summer of 1985, he made a mistake as he came out from the jump. Further, the  the wind caught his body and his skis in the air, forcing the skis out to each side of his body forming a V in the air. And instead of landing at the usual and also quite mediocre 70 meters, Jan Boklov now flew 20 meters further and landed at 90 meters! During his next practice jump, he made the same mistake and the skis formed yet again a V in the air, and again he flew down to 90 meters. Jan was flabbergasted, one because he was not used to jumping that far. And two because he realized that accidentally and completely by making a mistake he may just be onto something big. 
 And this is quite a game changer. By putting each ski out to the sides of the body, instead of keeping them parallel underneath the body, the ski jumper quite literally gets wings. With the skis forming a V the jumper increases the surface area that he can use to generate lift from the air, just like an airplane does. And in ski jumping, given it’s highly technical and aerodynamic nature, a simple change in style like can give the jumper 15-20 meters extra! Jan Boklov realized he was onto something big here and instead of correcting the “mistake” he had made, he continued to refine the style. Although ski jumping was a small sport in Sweden, a handful of Swedish elite jumpers participated in the World Cup. During the winter season of 1985 Jan Boklov had made his world cup debut as he had participated in two world cup events, finishing 39th and 48th. Not much to write home about in other words. 

Anyone who’s tried to learn the V style knows that it’s not done in a day.. I think it was in 1990 when I started ski jumping and I was 8 years old. And I started jumping parallel. As the V style caught on throughout the early 90s I tried to convert so to speak several times, and finally did so in 1993 I think it was when I was 11 years old. Between that and when I started experimenting with the style there were plenty of back and forth’s, as well as spectacular crashes, almost crashes, and other epic V style-attempt failures followed by crying and throwing my skis at the hill saying I’ll never do this again! And I was a kid trying to learn this, which is normally when you learn the fastest. And I also had some great jumpers to model my style after at that point too because the professionals had started to make the change as well! Jan Boklov was the pioneer, and he did all of this by himself. So when we look at his World Cup results, he had the 38th and 49th place from 1985, and he was mostly absent from the World Cup stage during the 1985/86 season. The following season, 86/87, he finished 10th in Innsbruck during the legendary German-Austrian four hills tournament, but also fluctuated wildly in his performances, finishing 87th in the very next competition in Bischofshofen. But as he kept jumping, Jan Boklov also kept learning this new style, and his results started to stabilize, at least some. 

And let’s stick with the term some stabilization, because when it comes to Jan Boklov, stable is not really the word that comes to mind. Throughout his career, he was plagued by one great jump followed by a failure of a jump. And probably more impressive, and also scary and flat out crazy was the fact that Boklov was epileptic! Ever since he was 11 years old he was diagnosed with epilepsy. And if there’s one sport a person with epilepsy should not do it’s probably ski jumping. On multiple occasions he suffered epileptic seizures after a jump. And one time during a competition he also suffered a seizure during the jump. He was sitting on the bar at the top of the inrun ramp, and from the moment he let go, and until he stopped at the bottom of the he hill he had zero recollection of the jump or what happened. But as he said, the brain and the body knows what to do even if the mind is not there! 

Going into the 1987/88 season, Boklov’s results started to be noticed. He finished 9th in the Sapporo competition in Japan early in season, his best result to date. 

In the 1988 Olympic Games in Calgary, the games otherwise dominated by the Flying Finn Matti Nykanen who won all three ski jumping golds, and a skier I’m quite sure we’ll cover in a later episode of Ski Heroes, Boklov finished at a modest 18th place on the large hill, and even more modest 28th on normal hill. 

But toward the end of the 88 season something started to happen for Boklov. He reached the podium for the first time, and actually twice, during the two-competition weekend on the normal hill and large hill in Lahti in Finland. In both competitions he was beaten by Matti Nykanen, who completely dominated the entire 1988 season. During the first Lahti competition, on the normal hill, Nykanen beat Boklov flat out, out-jumping him by 1.5 meters combined over the two jumps. But on the large hill the day after,  Boklov actually beat Nykanen by 4 meters combined after the two jumps. 

And this brings us to yet another technical aspect of the otherwise already very technical sport of ski jumping. What the audience at the stadium and on TV mostly pay attention to is the distance of the jumps. But the scoring in ski jumping is an advanced formula that combines both the distance jumped and the style points. And the style points are given by five judges on a scale from 0 to 20, and where the highest and the lowest style point is removed, leaving the jumper with the combined style points from three of the judges at any given point. Yep, it’s about as complicated as it sounds! And I’m not gonna waste a lot of time here explaining the ins and outs of this. But basically a jumper’s style is judged on aesthetics, both through the air and in the landing. The perfect landing is a telemark landing, with one ski in front of the other, as introduced by Sondre Norheim back in the 1800s. And while airborne the jumper can get points deducted if the arms waive around too much, if the skis are asymmetrical, if the body is not completely stretched out, etc, etc. 

And as Boklov started jumping further and further, the debate was raging in the world of ski jumping about how the judges should score his jumps as he split the skis forming a V instead of keeping the parallel as the norm was. Some judges punished him harder than other. And the worst judging came from the Norwegian judges. It pains me to admit this, being a Norwegian myself, but Norwegians are not very good at accepting innovation in sports.. Norway was against the introduction of the Winter Olympics, they were against the introduction of alpine skiing, saying that cross country skiing ought to be good enough. They were against women competing in skiing. They were against the introduction of fiber-glass skis and was the last country to compete on wooden skis. They were against the introduction of the skate-style in cross country skiing saying that it would destroy the sport of cross country. And I could continue for a long time with other things that the ski nation of Norway has tried to shut down. So surprise surprise, Norway was heavily opposed to the V-style that Boklov had introduced, saying that it would destroy ski jumping. Norwegian judges punished him more than any other judges. And it did not help that the president of the international skiing federation FIS was Norwegian as well. So in this particular competition in Lahti where Boklov beat Nykanen by 4 meters, Nykanen still beat Boklov by 2.9 points due to much higher style marks. After this competition, Nykanen went up to Boklov and said that “today you were the true winner”. And he even invited Boklov up to the top of the podium during the award ceremony after the competition as he knew he had been beaten even though the result did not show it.  

And that brings us to the season of 1988/89. Jan Boklov was at the height of his career during this season. The ski jumping world cup season usually starts in November or December, and goes on until the end of March. And already at the third competition of the season, in Lake Placid in the USA on December 12th 1988 history was written as Jan Boklov became the first Swedish ski jumper to ever win a world cup competition. Boklov won his second competition a week later on December 18th in Sapporo in Japan, beating the Finns Ari Pekka Nikkola and Matti Nykanen in the large hill competition. Sensationally enough, Jan Boklov was  now one of the favorites going into the German Austrian 4-hills tournament in taking place from the very end of December and lasting through the first week of January. 
 Sensationally, and also quite controversial due to his style. The debate kept raging about how many style points he should get. The FIS president, the Norwegian Torbjorn Yggeseth was a stark opponent to the V-style, stating that Boklov should never get higher than 16.5 to 17 style points at his very best, and threatening to remove judges who gave him higher marks than that. Further adding that “It is simply a shame for the sport of ski jumping that the Swedish Jan Boklov can win international competitions by jumping with his skis spread out to the sides like that. Winning jumps simply should not look like that”. It’s quite amusing reading the newspaper articles from the time when we now know how history panned out.
 
 

Boklov did not quite succeed in the overall 4-hills tournament this season as he finished fifth overall after the four competitons. But, he did win the Innsbruck competition of the tournament in January of 1989, marking the first time a 4-hills competition had been won by someone from Sweden. And although he out-jumped the closest competitor by 4.5 meters, he only won by 0.5 points! And again, I am not gonna go into details on how the scoring in ski jumping works. But this was an excellent illustration of the issue Boklov was facing: because the judges punished him so much for his style he needed to out-jump his competitors by a large margin in order to win. Boklov was notably annoyed by the way he was being discriminated against by the judges. Yet, his fairly mild-manner and his stuttering speech kept him from attacking back at FIS and the judges. More than anything, he was empathetic toward the judges, at least the non-Norwegian judges,  as he felt they were controlled by FIS and had no saying in the matter themselves. When he was interviewed by the legendary Norwegian journalist Arne Scheie after his Innsbruck win and he was asked about how many style points he felt he should get he stuttered “I jump, the judges judge”. And when Scheie followed up by asking him how he felt about the style marks of 17 and 17.5 that he had gotten in the Innsbruck competition he stuttering but confidently said “yeah, it was enough to win”. 

In the final 4-hills tournament competition in Bischofshofen in Austria Boklov finished 3rd. But again he jumped further than any other competitor, beating the winner, the American Mike Holland by 1.5 meters and the second place, Nikkola from Finland by 2 meters. In fact, this was a regular occurrence for Boklov throughout the 1989 season: In three competitions he finished third this season, and all three times he out-jumped all other competitors. And at the legendary Holmenkollen competition in 89, where he finished 5th, he still had the second longest combined distance of all jumpers. 

When I discovered that when working on this episode, the nerd in me took over and I built a spreadsheet to back out the style points that he had gotten during all of his competitions during this season. And looking at the data as it is called now, we can clearly see that Boklov consistently got between 1 to 2.5 style points less than all the other competitors. 

 Despite that, the V-style proved to be a huge advantage for Boklov. And if the 0.5 point win margin in Innsbruck had been the narrowest victory for him, the large hill competition in Harrachov in the Czech Republic was the most dominant one. Here Boklov outjumped his competitors by upwards of 20 meters! And it’s amazing when you look at the clips from this competition, as well as other ones, from the 1989 season because you can really see how much better Boklov flies through the air compared to all of his competitors who jumped parallel. And again going back to the technical part of ski jumping here. Because when we look at his jumps, from a technical standpoint they were really not very good. His technique at the takeoff is not great. And coming out from the jump his arms are often waiving a bit in the air as he finds his flying position. In all reality, Jan Boklov was really not that great of an athlete either compared to Weissflog, Nykanen, Vettori and the other big jumpers of the time. But the advantage he gained from his V-style alone gave him lengths that no one else could match and Jan Boklov won the entire World Cup that season, finishing the season with 5 victories and 8 podiums for the overall victory ahead of Germany’s Jens Weissflog. 

And as the 1989 season ended, that’s really also where the story of Jan Boklov ends. Although he did not retire from ski jumping until after the 1993 season, and he reached the podium one more time during the following 1989/1990 season, he was never able to return to the level of performance he had in 1989. The remainder of his career was plagued by injuries, and despite many attempts at comebacks, Jan Boklov at the end of the day become another one of ski jumpings one-hit wonders who dominates for one season, just to be gone the next. I personally remember vividly the first time I saw Boklov jump on TV. It must have been during the 1989 season and I was watching a competition with my dad when he said “now you’re gonna see something strange!”. And that was Boklov jumping with his V-style, a memory that’s still burned into my mind today! The following season, another two jumpers had converted to the V-style, Switzerland’s Stephan Zuend, and Germany’s Andre Kisewetter. In 1992 the FIS finally lifted the restrictions on style points for V-style jumpers, paving the way for all jumpers to convert. 

And 1992 was kind of a weird year for ski jumping because about 50% of the jumpers still jumped the classic parallel style, and the other half with the new V-style.  During the 1992 Olympics in Albertville in France, both ski jumping competitions were won by V-style jumpers. In fact, every single world cup and Olympic game competition during the 92 season was won by V-style jumpers! The following year, in 1993 all jumpers in the world cup circuit and made the change to the V-style. And I think this is when I finally made the change myself too.

And this was an amazing time for ski jumping. Because what Jan Boklov had done was to introduce a style that made jumpers fly much better, I mean MUCH better! And almost overnight all ski jumping hills became obsolete because the curve a ski jumper would follow through the air became much flatter with the V-style, and the old hills were now too steep. A true measure of how much more effective this style was came before before hills were re-built to fit the new style and some amazing new hill records were set in the old hills over the next year or two. During the 1993 World Championships in Falun in Sweden, Espen Bredesen improved the hill record by 9 meters when he jumped 125.5meters in the large hill for the world championship title. And in during the ski-flying competition in Vikersund the same year the same Espen Bredesen improved Matti Nykanen’s old hill record by 14 meters from 171 to 185 meters. I mean these are insane records as hill records are usually improved by 0.5 to 1 meter at a time and it showed what distances were possible with the new style. And herein lies also the true cost of Jan Boklovs mistake back in 1985. All ski jumping hills had to be re-built and modified. New hills that had cost several million to construct had to be rebuilt. The world famous Holmenkollen hill in Oslo had been renovated and modernized in the early 1990s just to become obsolete overnight and it had to be re-done again. Exactly how many millions of dollars Jan Boklov’s V style ended up costing the sport of ski jumping I don’t know, but safe to say Boklov is the most expensive skier of all time. 

As I mentioned earlier, ski jumping has seen many style and technique changes up through the years, but none has been as radical as Jan Boklovs discovery of the V-style. For 30+ years now ski jumpers have used the V-style. It’s made a radical shift in the sport as the focus now is more on flying than jumping. It has also severely specialized the sport, and made it less attainable for most people to do as the V-style is more technical, and the new flying technique is far more advanced than what the case was back when ski jumping was a folk-sport that just about all young boys would participate in. And I say boys, because for the longest time women were not allowed to compete! 

In that regard, the style has probably contributed to the current low number of ski jumpers. At the same time, the sport has become far safer as jumpers are now much more stable in the air and they fly at lower speeds than they used to when jumping parallel. And undoubtedly, the style has also enabled the current extreme jumps we see in ski flying with jumps over 250 meters. There is no way that would have ever been attainable with the old parallel style.

The sources I used for this episode were all open sources on the internet, including news paper articles, radio clips, and several clips on YouTube. This was an extremely fun episode to put together. Ski jumping is of course very near and dear to my heart and I have vivid memories from both my own struggle to convert to the V style as well as all the discussions and controversies that surrounded the style change in the early 90s. And it all came back to me as I was researching this story.

I want to say thank you again for all the good feedback I got from the first episode! I’m still very new at this and I consider this a continued learning experience as I keep writing episodes and learning more about the recording process and about podcasting over all. 

The Ski Heroes Instagram account is officially up and running with the first few posts already up so please follow us there, and you can also drop me a note on skiheroes@gmail.com. 

Although there is probably a 100% chance that there will be more stories on ski jumpers in the future, I’m thinking that for the next episode we’ll go to another sport and I’m thinking that we should probably go outside of Scandinavia as well. 

Until then, continue with your snow dances, and I hope you’ll tune in next time!