Despite it being the first day of spring, Gloucestershire is still firmly under a white blanket and Winter Olympic blues is still in the air. While many of you will no doubt be dusting off the sleds this week ParkLifeSport recapped when Ski Jumping came to Wembley back in 1961.
June 6th 1961 was glorious sunny day in London, Tottenham Hotspur had secured a historic league and cup double only a month previous with a 2-0 win over Leicester in the FA Cup final. The game took place at Wembley with over 100,000 fans in attendance.
Immediately following the game construction began. A gargantuan wooden structure standing 45.7 metres was erected over a period of weeks with the plastic landing spread across Wembley’s hallowed turf.
Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards wasn’t even born but this was Britain’s first major venture into hosting a ski-jumping event. The hosts England put a team forward with jumpers Alex Sykes, Tony Kennaway and Tim Asburner all lining up.
Politician Sir Charles Taylor was responsible for the hospitality of the athletes while they were in London. For European nations, this was a very attractive proposition to be wined and dined by a senior member of Parliament.
The promise of hospitality attracted ski-jumping powerhouses in Norway and West Germany. While Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, France, Austria, Italy were all represented at Wembley.
The winner of the event was Finnish athlete Veikko Kankkonen who later went onto win Gold at the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria.
Kankkonen, however, did not have the longest jump during the contest with that honour going to Norwegian Torgeir Brandtzaeg who jumped 34.5m on the afternoon.
England’s best effort came from Ashburner who jumped 27.4 metres but this was not enough to trouble the podium and the more experienced European jumpers.
Following the event, the structure was quickly dismantled and Ski Jumping has not returned to a stadium in the UK since.
The popularity of ski jumping increased massively in the 1980’s thanks to Cheltenham born Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards competing in the Winter Olympics in Calgary in 1988.
Edwards story has since been made into movie, but despite what people may think, Ski jumping was brought to the UK long before Eddie Edwards was a household name.
