Now that the Sochi Winter Olympics are over, we’re allowed to write about Team GB’s Andrew Musgrave, who is usually to be found as a member of Team LeasePlan Go; a professional sports team sponsored by LeasePlan Go where Andrew is the only non-Scandinavian.
Andrew, 23, is the best cross-country skier Britain has ever produced, in a sport where the Nordic countries tend to have a monopoly. In the run-up to the Winter Olympics, he caused a major upset by winning the sprint at Norway’s national championships – prompting astonishment and a lot of hand-wringing amongst Norwegian skiers. We caught up with him just as he arrived in Sochi.
LeasePlan [LP]: How, as a Brit, did you get involved in cross-country skiing?
Andrew Musgrave [AM]: I started skiing when I was about 5 years old. Because of my dad’s job in the oil industry my family moved around quite a bit. I was born in Dorset, but moved to the Shetland Islands when I was just five years old, then we moved to Alaska. It was in Alaska I started skiing.
We lived there for six years, and when we moved back to Aberdeenshire in Scotland (to a small village called Oyne) [age 11], I was actually not really any good at skiing. I had done a few races, but didn’t have a particular talent for it.
Randomly, a town just near Oyne had a cross-country ski club. It was something I could do, and joined as a way to get to know some other kids just after we moved. It was through Huntly Nordic Ski Club that I got more involved in racing, and started to train in a more structured way.
LP: When did you decide you wanted to race competitively?
AM: I slowly became better, and started to take a trip or two abroad each year to race against Scandinavian or European kids my own age. By the time I was 17 I was doing fairly well and had decided that skiing was something I really wanted to pursue. After I was finished with secondary school in Huntly I took a year out to focus on skiing.
I spent all winter travelling to races and ended up doing fairly well. After a ninth place finish at the World Junior Championships I was approached by a Norwegian coach, who asked if I wanted to spend the next year training at the ski gymnasium where he worked. This was too good an opportunity to pass up and I said that I definitely wanted to!
LP: It must have been a huge adjustment to move to Norway. How did you manage?
AM: I moved to Hovden in 2009. Hovden Ski Gymnas is a school for 16-19 year olds in Southern Norway where you can combine skiing at an elite level with education. When I went I was just skiing, as well as taking a few Norwegian classes, since I was already finished with school in the UK.
I ended up loving Norway and moved the year after (2010/11) with some of the guys from Hovden to Lillehammer. Lillehammer is one of the best places in Norway to train for skiing. The year we moved was our first year as seniors, as opposed to racing in the junior class. Lillehammer is stuffed full of elite seniors, and was a great place to make the step up to skiing as a senior.
LP: But you also decided you wanted to study at university in Norway.
AM: I was in Lillehammer for two years, and managed to get my Norwegian up to a good enough level that I could pass an entrance exam to university in Norway. I took the chance to start studying civil engineering at NTNU in Trondheim. I have been in Trondheim since autumn 2012.
LP: Even though you’re based there now, it must have been a huge step to win the Norwegian championships, beating the natives at their own national sport. What was the reaction like?
AM: I think it was quite a shock for the Norwegians to be beaten by a Brit. When Norwegians think of British people skiing, then they tend to think of tourists floundering around and spending more time lying sprawled on the ground than they do on their feet. So when I came along and won their national championships it must have been a bit of a surprise.
Although, saying that, most of the people within the skiing community know who I am, and hopefully knew that I am not completely useless! I suppose it was more of a surprise for the Norwegian media, who are less likely to have heard of me.
LP: How tough is your training regime?
AM: Skiing is a fairly demanding sport. We spend up to 30 hours of training per week, and endless hours of travelling between races and training camps. The hardest part of the sport is forcing yourself to head out and train during a high volume week in the autumn.
Your whole body aches from all the training you have been doing, muscles don’t want to move and just the act of walking down the stairs can cause everything to hurt. If you add on top of that wind, sleet and ice, it doesn’t make you jump for joy heading out for a session.
But these sessions are also the most rewarding. If you are tired, it is cold and you are out pushing yourself as hard as you can, you really feel like you are making progress.
LP: Since this is the LeasePlan blog, I bet the readers are wondering what you drive, given you must have to get to some fairly tricky terrain.
AM: My car is a trusty ’94 Toyota Corolla estate. Its got plenty of room for my skis, and starts no matter how cold it is!
Postscript:
Although Andrew missed out on the medals this year, and had to miss the team sprint event because of medical issues affecting a team-mate, he became the first Briton to make the quarter-finals in the cross-country skiing, placing 27th – GB’s highest-ever finish – in the sprint prologue.
