The Ski Pole That Norway Will Never Forget<br />“Hvor var du da Oddvar Brå brakk staven?” (“Where were you when Oddvar Bra broke<br />his pole?”) has become the country’s most beloved and recurring question.<br />For years, a national newspaper ran a feature every Monday asking, “Where were you when Oddvar Bra broke his pole?” Hundreds of people weighed in.<br />“I don’t know what he was thinking, but he didn’t let me pass,” Savyalov said.<br />By sheer happenstance, the pole handed to him during the race — by a friend who made a habit of running<br />alongside Norwegian skiers — was exactly the same length as the broken one, 147.5 centimeters.<br />“I just remember a shadow coming from left, with a pole,” said Bra, speaking through an interpreter.<br />Bra’s broken pole is kept in a glass box in the lobby of a hotel near the outdoor arena where the race occurred, displayed like a national treasure.<br />Watch the final minutes of the race and you can imagine a very different rendering of the same story, one that lionizes Savyalov.<br />“We never had any enmity, we never hated each other,” Savyalov said.<br />“Let him get a pole, man!” shouts the sportscaster for what is then Norway’s only national TV station.<br />If anyone deserves blame for the collision, he said, it’s Savyalov, who knew<br />that hill was Bra’s last chance to pass him and drifted ever so slightly to the left in an effort at blocking.
