“I spent the whole season chasing overinflation. Mentally I wasn’t in a good shape, plus when I went to the Olympics they said I was a leader,” Levandi recalled in the winter of 1988.
“The situation wasn’t the best. We had a psychologist with us who said: always look at me. I had to believe in something because for a long time I didn’t believe in myself. I didn’t believe in miracles, but I hoped for them. But he said, look, and then I believed in him that it would happen!”
It was half past two in the morning according to local time when Levandi took to the slopes on 29 January 1988. Sports journalist Gunnar Press summed up his review of Noorte Hääle the following day with the words: “The medal is ours and the lights in Estonia’s windows have not yet gone out.”
Poom confirms that this was indeed the case. “I myself am a boy from Mustamäe. I lived on the ninth floor, and in the houses opposite you could see that there were actually lights in the windows. Most Estonians stayed up at night and watched Allari on TV. It was known that he had a chance to win a medal. Since he was still competing under the flag of the Soviet Union, Estonians thought that Allar and this medal belonged to Estonia. Estonians needed new heroes, new role models,” he recalls the times of perestroika.
According to Levand, he didn’t hold back at that moment showing off his Estonian. “I still provoked hard, because after all I was Estonian. I had to put a Soviet Union sticker on my helmet, but I put stickers with blue and white combinations or my characters, AL. Like a little rebel! That’s why in 1989 I was kicked out of the national team,” he laughs.
Levandi recalls that the parties after the race were also wonderful. “All the contestants were in the same group and for some reason we always started doing ski jumps during the party. I don’t know why, but at some point the imagination ran out. One jumped somewhere, the other grabbed again and then fell. Eventually we all went to sleep. Life was good!”
2023-12-03 14:15:00
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