On This Date in Sports February 23, 1988: Eddie the Eagle

In collaboration with the Sportsecyclopedia.com

Matti Nykanen of Finland completes the Gold Medal sweep in Ski Jumping, winning the large hill with jumps of 120.8 meters and 103.2 meters, for 224 meters. At the same time, Erik Johnsen of Norway gets the Silver, and Matjaz Debelak of Yugoslavia takes the Bronze Medal. However, the last-place jumper wins everyone’s heart as England’s Michael “Eddie the Eagle” Edwards steals the show after his jumps combine for 57.5 meters.

Michael Edwards, nicknamed Eddie for his surname, was born in Cheltenham, England, on December 5, 1963. Despite being of average height and average sight and lacking coordination, and having poor vision, Edwards dreamed of representing Great Britain in the Olympic Games. Michael Edwards attempted several different sports without success before discovering the sport of ski jumping, a sport in which nobody else from Britain was competing.

Earning the nickname Eddie the Eagle, Edwards began training for the sport while working with a pair of American coaches, John Viscome and Chuck Berghorn, in Lake Placid, New York. The self-funded Edwards had to wear several pairs of socks to make his boots fit, even though he was 20 lbs heavier than even the biggest ski jumpers were. While training, Michael Edwards immediately ran into problems as his thick-lensed glasses often fogged under his goggles. With the hopes of qualifying for the Olympics as the only British competitor at the 1987 World Championships, Edwards ranked 55th in the world and earned his spot in the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary.

With his thick glasses, Michael Edwards hardly looked like an Olympic athlete, was most thought he was crazy for even trying to compete in the Winter Games. While not training for the Olympics, Eddie the Eagle worked and lived rent-free at a mental hospital.

Eddie the Eagle got his first chance to fly in the Normal Hill event on February 14th at the 1988 Winter Olympics. However, his flight was not very long as his score was 69.2, finishing dead last among 58 other competitors, less than half the distance earned by the next lowest score posted by Spain’s Bernat Sola. Meanwhile, Matti Nykanen of Finland won the Gold Medal, while Pavel Ploc and Jiri Malec of Czechoslovakia took the Silver and Bronze.

For Matti Nykanen, nicknamed the “Flying Fin,” it was two individual Gold Medals to go along with his Gold and Silver from the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. Combined with a Gold Medal in the Team Event in 1988, Nykanen is one of the most decorated Ski Jumpers in the history of the Olympic Games, being the first to win both events in the same Olympics. However, there would be no major film based on his Olympic triumphs. Instead, “Eddie the Eagle” three decades later had his own story produced and somewhat fictionalized by Hollywood in 2016.

Michael Edwards would be grounded following the 1988 Winter Olympics, as the International Olympic Committee adopted the “Eddie the Eagle Rule,” requiring all Olympic hopefuls to be placed in the top 30% or Top 50, whichever was fewer for their given events.