The mystery of Norway

Aksel Lund Svindal of Norway competes during the men's giant slalom. Getty Images

Medal Count

Country	Gold	Silver	Bronze	Total
United States	7	9	12	28
Germany	7	10	7	24
Norway	6	6	6	18
Canada	7	6	2	15
Russian Federation	3	4	6	13
South Korea	5	4	1	10
Austria	4	3	3	10
France	2	3	5	10
Switzerland	6	0	2	8
China	4	2	2	8

Full Medals Table

Copyright © 2010 by STATS LLC.
All rights reserved. 

As of 24 February 2010

Vancouver, British Columbia -- By the end of these Olympic Games, the Norwegians will have pulled off what is, arguably, one of the finest performances in the modern history of sports. The only problem is that nobody outside Norway seems to take them seriously.

Ignoring them, or jealous of them? The US media is preoccupied with US athletes, though it does find a story or two to milk that is not of an US athlete.

Norway's Olympic team has won 17 medals in Vancouver so far, enough to place it third overall and only one gold medal behind the leaders. The country grabbed three medals Tuesday, including silver and bronze, respectively, for Kjeitil Jansrud and Aksel Svindal in the men's giant slalom. The haul is expected to continue throughout this final week.

Norway has won more Winter Games medals than any other nation. Last week it became the first country to win 100 Olympic gold medals, and Tuesday it hit the 300-medal milestone (the U.S. is second on the all-time list with dozens fewer.)


What makes its performance hard to fathom, however, is that Norway has only 4.7 million people to choose from. It's as if the American team finished third in Vancouver after limiting the athlete pool to people living in metropolitan Detroit. To find a country smaller than Norway, you have to travel down the medals table to Latvia, which is tied for 18th with two medals.


The Norwegian obsession with the Winter Games is nearly unbridled. When biathlon aired in Norway during prime time one recent evening, 1.75 million households tuned in, according to Mr. Lea. "There's a lot of pressure on us," he says After those first four days, Norway roared back, winning medals of every color in the sports it cares about most—cross country, biathlon, ski jumping and alpine skiing.


1.75 million of 4.7 is  37% of the country's population; Census.gov shows the US population as of 25 February 2010 to be 308,756,226; 37% would be 114,962,424 (more than watched the Super Bowl? or roughly equivalent).

Not that they've been bragging or anything. After crossing the finish line Tuesday, Mr. Jansrud didn't beat his chest or pump his fist or mug for the international TV feed—instead he took two deep bows to his applauding countrymen.

 Alien to North Americans.

Kerouac at Bat

New York Public Library, Berg Collection, Jack Kerouac Archive. Jack Kerouac’s fantasy baseball team cards, circa 1953-56.


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Almost all his life Jack Kerouac had a hobby that even close friends and fellow Beats like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs never knew about. He obsessively played a fantasy baseball game of his own invention, charting the exploits of made-up players like Wino Love, Warby Pepper, Heinie Twiett, Phegus Cody and Zagg Parker, who toiled on imaginary teams named either for cars (the Pittsburgh Plymouths and New York Chevvies, for example) or for colors (the Boston Grays and Cincinnati Blacks).

He collected their stats, analyzed their performances and, as a teenager, when he played most ardently, wrote about them in homemade newsletters and broadsides. He even covered financial news and imaginary contract disputes. During those same teenage years, he also ran a fantasy horse-racing circuit, complete with illustrated tout sheets and racing reports. He created imaginary owners, imaginary jockeys, imaginary track conditions.

All these “publications,” some typed, some handwritten and often pasted into old-fashioned composition notebooks, are now part of the Jack Kerouac Archive at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. The curator, Isaac Gewirtz, has just written a 75-page book about them, “Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats,” to be published next week by the library and available, at least for now, only in its gift shop.


Slide Show ‘Kerouac at Bat’

Among other things, Mr. Gewirtz has learned that Kerouac played an early version of the baseball game in his backyard in Lowell, Mass., hitting a marble with a nail, or possibly a toothpick, and noting where it landed. By 1946, when Kerouac was 24, he had devised a set of cards with precise verbal descriptions of various outcomes (“slow roller to ss,” for example), depending on the skill levels of the pitcher and batter. The game could be played using cards alone, but Mr. Gewirtz thinks that more often Kerouac determined the result of a pitch by tossing some sort of projectile at a diagramed chart on the wall. In 1956 he switched to a new set of cards, which used hieroglyphic symbols instead of descriptions. Carefully preserved inside plastic folders at the library, they now look as mysterious as runes.

Donkey Ball

Somehow, this is a pithy commentary on so much of society.








Audio Slide Show

Stubborn, Slow and Braying to Fans in Small Gyms

As for Tibeteans, freedom beckons Cubans

Wanting to be free, they defected.

From left, Yordany Alvárez, Loanni Cartaya Prieto, Erlys García Baró, Yeniel Bermúdez and José Manuel Miranda, five of the seven Cubans who defected Friday.

Baseball Up Against Great Wall

Baseball goes to China.

Associated Press

Los Angeles Dodgers players Wilken Ruan, left, and Juan Gonzalez climb the Great Wall of China, Friday.

While the National Basketball Association has done regular business with the Chinese for two decades, the first MLB office opened in Beijing in 2006. MLB has supported the fledgling China Baseball League and the national team, while also opening an academy for young players and making other efforts to seed the sport throughout China, which still has less than 100 baseball diamonds. "The first step in a long journey" is a phrase you hear often talking to MLB officials.