On my last day in Kirkenes I spent the morning with 36 Alaskan Huskies and Stephen, a crazy German dog-musher with frostbitten hands. I watched as he fed them whale meat slop and then loaded them into a truck to go training. You could tell these were happy dogs. They were athletes, training to go 1000km in four days. “If I could find the money I would go to Alaska and win the Iditarod, like Sorlie. But it costs 360,000 Kr and I have no sponsors.” He lost four huskies two winters ago and almost died when he drove his sled over a frozen lake that caved in. When I asked him why he had chosen such a difficult sport, he shrugged. “These dogs are my life.”
Stephen also used to be a very good footballer and had several opinions on Euro 2012. “Everybody cries now,” he said of the Germans. “I don’t raise my children to cry.” He also predicted the Russians will go far. “The border is there,” he gestured over the lake (the other side indeed being Russia). “I know their mentality. Their new coach lets them drink vodka after the game,” he said. “Their old coach tried to train them like Europeans. You can’t do that with the Russian team. Look at Arshavin. He didn’t do well at Arsenal because they wouldn’t let him drink vodka. He was lost. Now look at him. He’s the best player on the field again.”
ADDENDUM (7/17): Now that we know that Stephen was wrong and Russia did not go far into the tournament (I watched their ignominious collapse in Gorky Park), I think it is helpful to bring in Arshavin himself on the Russian mentality:
“To put it simply,” he said in a recent interview with UEFA, “we can lose against every team and we can win against every team. It’s in the character of the Russian people that, when we gather our strength in our fist and we don’t have anywhere to retreat to, we can win against any team. But if we relax a bit and follow our feelings, we can lose to a very weak team. For a foreigner, it is difficult to understand; you need to live for some time in our country and only then you will understand it.”
(Or maybe he just drank too much vodka?)
