Eddie’s life on celluloid

What annoys me,” says Mrs Eddie the Eagle, “is when the papers call him a loser. Eddie’s anything but a loser.”

Her charming six-month-old daughter, Honey, who I seem to be holding, regurgitates some milk on my lapel.
“Would a loser compete in the Winter Olympics even though he had no sponsorship? Could a loser come from a country where there are no ski jumps and yet compete at the highest level?” says Mrs Eddie (real name Sam Edwards) as her three-year-old daughter Ottilie presents me with her plastic tiara and insists that I wear it. “I think not.”
Good points. One might add: would a loser come last in both the 70m and 90m ski jumps at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics and yet cultivate his brand image so cleverly that he recently sold the film rights for his life story for a substantial(ish) sum and got top British comedian Steve Coogan to play him? Would a loser have worked last week as an after-dinner speaker on a P&O cruise? Would a loser be in demand as a motivational speaker? I think not.
We’re in the living room of the Edwards English family home in the Cotswold village of North Woodchester, near Stroud, awaiting the arrival of the world’s most-derided ski jumper, the man variously branded Mr Magoo, the Barmy Brit, clown, chump, a disgrace to ski jumping (gosh, that must have hurt), and a very British kind of hero. I half expect Eddie the Eagle to arrive through the living-room window, brush off shards of glass and greet his wife with a cheery: “Hi, darling, I’m home. Only minor lacerations tonight.”
While we wait, I snoop. On a little shelf are Eddie’s Winter Olympic medals. So they give medals to people who come last, I think, with the chippiness of a person whose last award was a bronze swimming badge 30-odd years ago.
Ottilie pirouettes across the floor and taps me with her plastic wand. She tells me she has already been skiing on Gloucester’s dry slopes. Will she follow in daddy’s ski steps? “She’s more into ballet,” says her mother. And Honey? “Give her a chance. She’s only six months old.”
A pick-up truck pulls up outside bearing the legend “Michael Edwards – plasterer and general builder”.
A man who has spent a hard day tiling floors climbs out covered in dust. It is our hero. The bottle-bottom glasses have gone, but the Bob Hope-like ski jump of a nose, rhyming with his slightly elongated chin, remains.
Which tragicomic way will he choose to enter the house? Falling down the chimney? Through a wall? Instead, he comes through the door in the traditional manner and gives Ottilie a kiss.
“You’ll have to shower if you’re going to be photographed,” says Sam to her husband of the past six years. What happened to Eddie’s specs? “I had eye surgery three years ago,” he says. “I’ve got implants. It does wonders for your confidence and it’s great for sports. Improved my golf no end.”
Does he agree with any part of Coogan’s recent description of him as “quirky, dysfunctional, slightly nerdy, but his balls must be made of titanium”? “I don’t disagree with any of that,” says Eddie. “Except I think I’m more eccentric than dysfunctional. Nerdy? Maybe. But I don’t mind the rest. I’ve been called worse.”
I take this as confirmation that his guts are made of titanium. Possibly my weirdest scoop.
“The problem with Coogan is he isn’t the right age. The film is going to be about a little window of my life when I was 24 in Calgary. He’s in his 40s. But he is a great sitcom comedian, which is what I wanted. My fear was that it would be someone who just did slapstick.”
Who should play him then? “Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise would be ideal.” “Don’t be daft, love,” says Sam.
Reportedly, the script, by Times journalist Sean Macaulay, is currently being polished by Steve Coogan and his writing partner Henry Normal.
Declan Downey, the award-winning director of Father Ted, will helm the as yet untitled picture. Filming is due to start in January, and the release date is due to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Eddie’s cataclysmic Canadian pratfalls.
What does Eddie remember of Calgary? “Everything, unfortunately,” he says. “It went wrong as soon as I arrived. My bags exploded on the carousel at the airport, so I jumped on and chased after my pants and slippers.”
Do Olympians generally take their slippers to competitive events? It seems unlikely.
How come he managed to represent Britain at ski jumping? “At the time there was a rule that a country could send one representative to each sport in the Olympics. I loved skiing and as a kid I wanted to be a stuntman, so I decided to put them together.”
Why did he, in particular, get the nod from the British Ski Federation? “Nobody else applied. I mean, I wasn’t completely incompetent: I’d done a 77m jump, which wasn’t big by Olympic standards, and I held the record for stunt jumping (10 cars and six buses). I realised two years before the Olympics that I might be able to get to Calgary because no one else was going to apply and so started training. I got a lot of advice from Austrian and French ski-jumping coaches, but because I can’t speak French or German, a lot of it went over my head.”
His first major competition was the 1987 World Championships in Oberstdorf in which he came 98th in a field of 98. Already though, the media had realised that, in the charisma-free world of ski jumping, here was a true star.
He just wasn’t very good at his chosen sport.
By the time he arrived at Calgary, he had been given the ironic soubriquet Eddie the Eagle (critics suggested that the Briton, who was 9kg heavier than the average ski jumper, flew like a brick). He was widely expected to wind up in traction rather than on the medallists’ podium. But first, he had to get out of the airport without major injury. For a few minutes, it seemed unlikely that he would.
“As we were walking to the arrivals lounge, I saw a huge sign saying, ‘Welcome to Calgary, Eddie the Eagle.’ I said: ‘Who’s that for?’ And somebody replied: ‘You, you twerp.’
So I walked towards it. It was 2.30 in the morning and the automatic doors had been turned off, so I walked into the glass and my skis bounced off the doors.” And he says he doesn’t want slapstick. “That’s when I got the nickname Mr Magoo.”
Did it all go downhill from there? (So sorry.) “Yes. Everything I did went wrong.” He had to wear glasses for short-sightedness, but they sometimes fogged as he sped towards possible death.
But he was afraid of jumping? “Of course I was. There was always a chance that my next jump would be my last. A big chance.”
Although he survived the jumps, he later had to recover from bankruptcy. Most of the money from ad campaigns, his top 50 UK single Fly Eddie Fly and his two Finnish hits Mun Nimeni on Eetu and Eddien Siivella (the Finns adored his mispronunciations of their native tongue) had gone. “I sued my trustees for mismanaging the trust. Eventually they settled out of court.”
But he made more money out of his life story thanks to after-dinner gigs, motivational speaking and a book called On the Piste, the film rights to which he sold in 2000.
“I get about a thousand dollars every time they renew the option, which is every six months or so, and in 2003 I got a £25,000 lump sum.”
We walk back to the car park in the gathering gloom. “They always mention me in the same breath as Dunkirk or the Beagle II (the British satellite that got lost on Mars).”
Does he feel like a failure? “Not a bit.” As we walk, he tells me about his speaking engagements, his plans to do a master’s in law, his project to turn the seven-bedroom second home into a B&B, and of his not unreasonable hopes of a big cheque from the movies’ money men. Then he drives home to tuck in his daughters. Loser? I think not.