In memory of Olaf Tufte, the Norwegian Olympic rowing legend who died on Tuesday 21 July, Row360 republishes the feature interview ‘Olaf Tufte The Last Chapter?’. Tufte spoke with Rachel Quarrell in 2020, as he prepared for his seventh and final Olympics, the postponed Tokyo Games held in 2021 in Tokyo, Japan.

Mourning Norwegian Olympic Legend Olaf Tufte

Norwegian legend in his own lifetime Olaf Tufte is not the only oarsman aged over 40 on his way to the 2020 Olympics, but he has been racing the longest: 24 of the last 25 seasons, with only one ‘year off’ in 2013 after which he decided to return to the sport. Since then the repetition, variable results and being old enough to have fathered most of the rest of the Norwegian team have not put him off. So what has kept him rowing for so long?

Tufte is tall, physically strong and ridiculously fit, and stories abound about his self-imposed extra ‘training’ regime — chopping wood and lugging heavy sacks around the family farm after hours on the water. But his eyes stand out: there’s a sparky alertness in them matching his unusually active, eager and self-aware attitude even amongst rowers. Talking to him for Row360 elicits a patchwork of stories and analysis, snapshots betraying the motivation of a man who has dedicated his life to a sport he never intended to do in the first place.

Teenage Tufte was a motocross fanatic roaring around mud tracks on lightweight motorbikes, heading towards professional driving. But unlike his team-mates who went abroad to train in winter, Tufte had to stay behind at home working on the family farm in Horten, a small city and rural area in southern Norway. Knowing some juniors at the Horten Roklubb five minutes from his house, he went there to keep fit on the ergs and weights.

“After three weeks on the erg I started to beat the rowers, including some of the best guys in Norway,” he explains. “When the summer came the coach said ‘we need you in the boat’, and I said ‘I’m not a rower, I don’t have time for rowing, I have to farm and I want to do motocross’.” The problem was that the coach had a gap in a good junior four aiming to win the national championships. “He asked me if I could help him out for a couple of months then I would be free to go,” says Tufte chuckling. “That was my mission — to jump in the boat and help the guys win a gold medal at the nationals. My first time on the water was 2nd April 1994.” That was 25 years ago.

The quartet with the novice rower won the national championships, the Scandinavian championships and were duly sent to the junior worlds, where they came sixth.

“The following year there was a gap in the under-23 Norwegian BM4x, and someone said ‘There’s a crazy guy down the coast, he will probably be at least fit enough if you manage to teach him how to scull’.” So in July 1995 newbie sculler 19-year-old Tufte raced in a Norwegian quad which claimed his first medal — a silver — at the under-23 Nations’ Cup. He never went back to competitive motocross.

The following year was his first appetite- whetting Olympic experience, eighth in Atlanta 1996 in the straight four. Then came a predictable trajectory for a young athlete not yet seen as a skilful boat mover. “In this period I was the best guy in all physical tests — on the ergs, on the machines — I was by far the best already. But on the water Fredrik [Bekken] was better than me.” Bekken got the singles slot and Tufte floated around various crew boats, apart from his first singles competition at the 1998 Munich world cup, when Bekken was busy trialling doubles options. Tufte went solo and came fourth behind Jamie Koven, Vaclav Chalupa and Ibrahim Aly — all significant sculling talents — beating two more in the shape of Andris Reinholds and Luka Spik.

The 1998 worlds saw Tufte slapped back down into the M4- while Bekken made the single and the 1997 silver-medal M2x combination of Kjetil Undset and Steffen Stoerseth was reselected. “I was really pissed off, I was so angry. I thought that I should have a spot in that double, because I was better than both of them physically and I beat them in the single,” says Tufte. He came 6th, Bekken 7th, and the double again took silver.

“Probably that’s one of the reasons why I succeeded in the end, because I stepped up and took even more control over my own training and my goals — ‘do you really want to be good or do you want to be slipped around whenever a coach needs a new guy’. I remember coming home to my club coach after the worlds in 1998, and I told him ‘next year the guys will be in a line asking me to row with them, I will destroy them and they will beg for my place in the boat’. The next year I was really really fit, I won everything the whole spring, and ended up in the double with Fredrik.” For two years Bekken and Tufte never left the FISA podium, winning world cup bling along with a world champs bronze (1999) and Olympic silver (2000). “I think that’s probably the best thing that happened to me rowing-wise, because [Bekken] was the guy who taught me the most ever about the rowing stroke. Within two years I was really good.”

Following Sydney Tufte was shocked when virtually the whole Norwegian team retired, including Bekken, leaving him with only one option. “I was 24 years old and suddenly I was the oldest guy in the team. Having two medals in the worlds and Olympics in the double, I was more or less the first guy in the single.” He was also narked at the lost opportunity, Slovenia’s Olympic champions Luka Spik and Iztok Cop (pronounced ‘chop’) deciding not to race the double in 2001.

“I always gave [Bekken] a hard time because I think we could have won in 2001 in the double. I gave him sh*t all the way up to the day I won the single scull [at the 2001 worlds]. I actually talked to Fredrik the day before the final actually, because he is a good friend. I said ‘ok you bastard, you cost me the gold medal because we would have won this race, now I’ll have to do it myself and we’ll see how it goes’. I don’t think I was actually prepared to win the single sculls that first year at all. My mind was just ‘grab my chance and go as hard as I could’. It was a really tight race, one of the best.”

The spectacular Lucerne worlds final in 2001 finished with him, silver medallist Cop and third-placed Chalupa all 0.3 seconds apart, and probably induced 1996 champion Xeno Müller, who came fifth, to retire. It was also another turning point. “When I started out in [single] sculling there was a bit more rivalry between the rowers. But Iztok and I had already become friends. In the single scull we ended up trying to kill each other in the semi-final, but cooling down we were talking together and laughing. I ended up being Iztok’s best man, we started to train together, going on vacation, it ended up everyone’s good friends together. Rowing’s one big family.”

It’s not an unreasonable claim: pre- 2001 the top single scullers rarely fraternised outside regattas. Tufte and Cop’s close friendship grew into a tightly-connected top M1x community which has since then seen the world’s best scullers race Great Eight crews together at events such as The Head Of The Charles Regatta, started the tradition of hoisting the winner on the shoulders of the bronze and silver medallists, and egging each other on by hosting joint training periods at their home clubs.

This is typical of the big Norwegian: he likes making other people happy, his mix of activities the key to why he’s continued to enjoy rowing. “I could probably have one or two medals extra, and been maybe a little bit better, if I gave rowing 100% all the time, but then I wouldn’t last. I love rowing, but there’s more to life than just rowing. Sometimes I do too much, yes I know, but I love doing things, I love making things happen, I love to help people. That’s why people keep calling me, I have a really hard time saying no. It’s not a good word, ‘yes’ is a much better word.” He plans to try saying ‘no’ more often in the run-up to Tokyo, to give himself more rest time.

Tufte’s non-rowing activities range from being a firefighter and posting near-international times in cross-country skiing to modelling work and running his own clothing company. This is the man whose grandma taught him to swing an axe and use a saw when he was 4-5 years old, chopping firewood on the farm to which he has recently added an events business which host weddings and Olaf-centric teambuilding courses. No wonder his wife asked him to go back to rowing after he’d taken a year out in 2013: he’s constantly busy. “And after one year off with what was supposed to be normal work, I figured out that I don’t like going to meetings with a lot of people who dont manage to decide anything and just drink coffee and eat dry biscuits,” Tufte explains. Norway’s equivalent of Sir Steve Redgrave, he has personally won 12% of his country’s medals at the last five Summer Games, and in high networking demand not only personally but also for the national federation.

You might think a man who’s had only one season off the sport is very healthy, but he just trains through problems. He’s had knee operations twice, a bad issue with his back in the autumn of 2003, and was diagnosed with asthma in 2005 which limited his training on the way to defending his singles title in Beijing and may to some extent explain his media reputation for ‘coming good on the big day’. When dipping results seemed to be down to age — 6th, 4th, 6th, 9th and 14th in the years 2009-2014 — they were more likely due to an undetected low-grade infection he carried for several years. “My doctor said, ‘you’re just old now, you need to relax,'” Tufte says with an unimpressed snort, “but it was 2013 before they discovered I had been training through a fever and my body was not OK”.

It wasn’t until 2015 that the doctors got the problem properly under control, leading to Tufte’s return to form with European bronze and a worlds fourth place in the pre-Rio year — one of his proudest achievements. “After the semi-final in 2015, I was turning around and going down to the pontoon, and the audience — friends, people from other countries, commentators — was cheering me for qualifying into the final and making the Olympic spot. That was one of my biggest memories ever in rowing because I really felt that they wanted me to make that final and wanted me to go to another Olympic Games.”

He eventually abandoned the Rio singles slot, moving into the double to win bronze with 2013 M2x champion Kjetil Borch, while Borch’s 2013 partner Nils Jakob Hoff came 11th in the single. “I could have rowed in the single if I wanted to, but in my head we had a better opportunity to win the gold medal in the double. In Rio I don’t think I’d have been fit enough to actually win [the M1x] because the guys were really good, I would probably have been able to make a medal, but I thought winning the single would be harder than the double.”

Borch and Hoff were two of the younger Norwegians who have benefited from Tufte’s establishment of ‘Team Tufte’ to develop the national squad. “The dream was to win the gold medal at the Olympic Games, and the goal was to make the fastest double on the race course,” says Tufte. The final didn’t quite go to plan thanks to the wind and waves which made any race down the Rio de Janeiro course an exercise in survival. As Tufte puts it, he and Borch “f****ed up the start in the waves”, and found themselves rowing very badly shortly after the start, with the world champion Sinković brothers well ahead of them.

“After 200m I had to make a really quick decision, either we go like this and we’ll finish fifth, or I have to kill this rhythm and start all over again. So I turned halfway round to Kjetil and said ‘easy, cool down’ and took the rhythm down to about 30 rate so we could get it under control. We lost 5 seconds in the first 500 metres, but from that point on we raced 2.7sec faster than the Sinković brothers on the way to the finish line.” Nearly the fastest, then.

Tufte’s cool experienced head also helped earlier in the week. “We were quite close in the semi-finals to taking down the Sinkovićs, but I decided not to do it. I’m not trying to be cocky or anything — in that semi-final we were racing quite well, but we did not sprint to the finish line. Kjetil was pissed at me afterwards, he said ‘why the hell didn’t we go, we could have taken them and showed them we were better’.”

“I told him that’s exactly the reason why we didn’t: I didn’t want to show them that we can. I don’t want to use all my energy in this race when we are already in the final. I’m not sure if I empty my tank that I can refill it before the final, because I’m not 22 anymore. And reason number three — this will be your first Olympic final, and I don’t want you going in there as the favourite with all media on top of your head asking you questions about how it is to be the fastest boat. For me this is the perfect match: we’re still hungry, we’re still chasing them and they think they have us, so it’s the right way to go.” The result: a bronze medal despite the messy start, Tufte’s fourth podium finish in six consecutive Olympics, and Borch’s first.

Now he strokes the Norwegian quad project, considered the selectors’ best bet for Tokyo without Borch, now one of the world’s singles experts. Tufte didn’t entirely agree, feeling it a risk as the group has no spare oarsmen, but has thrown his considerable motivation and experience behind it now. Norway finished fourth in the 2019 world champs semi-final, narrowly failing to catch the fading Chinese. “We were really disappointed after that semi-final — I don‘t lose sprints, I hate to lose sprints. If you get to the final you can let go and you can just see what you‘re made of. But we had to go up against world champions, Olympic champions, world record holders in that B-final with only two spots to go [to Japan] — it’s the worst scenario to be in. The young guys had to lift me up after that, I was ready to just go home and be a farmer,” Tufte confesses.

He repaid them two days later when the B-final was delayed by a messily communicated FISA Fairness Commission decision to change the lanes due to the crosswind. “I’m very proud of the guys. We were almost crossing with one of the umpires, arguing with him, changing number plates. But the boys kept their head in the boat, and listened to what I had to say and I’m proud of what I managed to do.” They beat the British, won the B-final, and booked their tickets to Tokyo. It gives Tufte more days doing what he loves. “Once the boat starts to move, and you start to get the flow of it, nothing beats that feeling when you feel the harmony between what you put into the water and what you get out. The float of the boat on the water and how the boat releases from the water and goes ahead. For me it doesn’t matter [whether sculling or sweep], I just love the whole set-up and the feeling you get when you manage to pull some good strokes.”

And when does he imagine stopping competitive rowing? An immediate and unexpectedly clear answer. “My idea is that I will stop rowing competitively on the 28th of July 2020” — the quads finals day in Tokyo. Should we be sceptical? “I’ll rephrase another rower,” he says. “If you see me in a racing boat after 28th July 2020 you can shoot me.” As we put the phone down, I wonder if he remembers how that story ended…

Olaf Tufte Died of Acute Cardiac Arrest, Family Confirm