The Winter Olympics cult hero on horrific injuries he sustained ski jumping, proving people wrong and what he wants to do on his 100th birthday
My Sporting Life is The i Paper’s look behind the curtain at what drives sports stars to greatness. This week we speak to ski jumper Michael “Eddie the Eagle” Edwards who captured the hearts of the British public after finishing last at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary.
The highlight of my career was competing at the 1988 Winter Olympics
For me, getting there was my gold medal. No one expected me to qualify, let alone compete at the Games. I can still remember it to this day, even though it has been 38 years.
I did the World Championships in 1987, and that was brilliant. But the Winter Olympics is next level, really. It was fantastic.
Edwards pictured competing at the 1988 Winter Olympics (Photo: Getty)
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Even though I’ve jumped further, it is still my proudest achievement. My personal best is 119.5m. So I’m pleased I managed to get a certain level, even though most people didn’t see it because it was in training.
Ski jumping is a lot safer than it used to be
There’s nothing like jumping when you know if you get it wrong it could really, really hurt, you could even die.
I fractured my skull twice, which is quite difficult to do because you’re wearing a helmet. I broke my jaw in two places, smashed my collarbone in five places, broke three ribs and damaged my kidney. But that was out of about 25,000 jumps, so one injury every 5,000 jumps, which isn’t too bad, really.
My worst accident was a broken back and neck. I was 18, working in Italy. I’ve broken lots of things, but I’m lucky that I don’t suffer from the injuries. I don’t have any arthritis problems or anything like that.
The biggest mistake I made was allowing my trustees to look after my trust fund
All the money I earned from Calgary went into a trust fund. I had three trustees looking after that money, and they looked after it very badly, and I didn’t have enough. They made me bankrupt. So HMRC allowed me to sue my trustees for alleged mismanagement and negligence, and I got some of my money back.
Now I’m very, very careful, and I tend to put my money into property because I’m a builder and plasterer, so I know more about property than I do about stocks and shares. I’m quite happy to put money into an interest account, earning maybe four or five per cent interest, and I’m okay with that. It’s very, very low risk.
Whereas I can buy a house, I can do it up myself and I can sell it. I used to do that a lot. I don’t do it so much now as I’m getting older.
I want to ski down a mountain on my 100th birthday
Edwards says he has been through injury hell over the years (Photo: Getty)
I want to ski down a red run or a black run somewhere, whether it be Austria, Italy or Switzerland. That’s top of my bucket list. I like to stay active.
I think if I become a couch potato, maybe I’ll start to seize up. So it’s a good excuse to keep moving. I want to be able to do as much as I can for as long as I possibly can.
There are certain sports that I still love to watch, but I can only watch about 10 minutes before I get bored because I’d rather be out there doing it myself. I support Liverpool, but I couldn’t tell you who plays. I couldn’t sit down and watch a football match.
The lessons I learned are still with me to this day
It was hard sleeping in the back of the car, sleeping in a caravan, sleeping in the back of a van, sleeping in a cow shed, scraping food out of a bin, sleeping in a psychiatric hospital. But all these things gave me so many valuable life lessons that I wouldn’t have got any other way. And I think that’s more important than winning a gold medal.
I’m very grateful for the attention and the inspiration I’ve given people but it was not my intention to do that. I just want people to go out there and live their lives. If they get inspiration from my story, then that’s great.
It’s nice to be remembered for that resilience, that tenacity, that determination, that never giving up. No matter how many people tell you you can’t do it, if you think you can, you get out there and prove them wrong.
The strangest experience I’ve had was in an Amsterdam brothel
It was an interview I did for Dutch television. It was at a high-class brothel in Amsterdam called the Yab Yum Club.
We were both lying on the bed, and he was interviewing me about being a celebrity, saying “you must have had lots of women throwing themselves at you” and all that kind of stuff.
Being British, naturally I was rather uptight about the whole thing. Of course, the Dutch don’t have that problem. So that was certainly one of the strangest things I’ve done.
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