As for the jumping, any plans for repeat Olympic exposure reached a juddering halt. In 1990, the International Olympic Committee introduced the Eddie the Eagle Rule, dictating that any athlete at the Games had to be in the top 30 per cent of international competitors or the top 50, whichever was fewer. Although he tried to return in 1992 and 1994, even securing funding from charter company Eagle Airlines for his 1998 Nagano bid, he would never grace the grandest stage again.
What makes Edwards an Olympic hero
If you judged his career simply in athletic terms, you could just about understand it. But if you looked at him as the ultimate expression of Pierre de Coubertin’s Olympic creed – “the important thing is not winning but taking part, just as in life, what counts is not the victory but the struggle” – the rush to exclude him seemed at best counter-productive, at worst vindictive.
Edwards is emblematic of all that the Olympics is supposed to be. It is no coincidence that the best-known feel-good film about the Winter Games, other than his own, is Cool Runnings, inspired by the journey of the Jamaican bobsleigh team who, like “the Eagle”, took Calgary by storm despite finishing last.
Just as Sydney 2000 needed Cathy Freeman, both a supreme athlete and a symbol of Australian national unity, it was also defined by Eric “the Eel” Moussambani, the swimmer from Equatorial Guinea who had never even seen a 50-metre pool but who, flailing desperately across his lane, won his one-man heat in the 100m freestyle with the slowest time in Olympic history.
Sport pushes such stories into the shadows at its peril. Edwards, always sunny in disposition, remains aggrieved at the rule designed to keep him on the margins, arguing: “It flies in the face of the whole Olympic ideal. Yes, there has been a lot of controversy, especially with that Australian lady Raygun scoring zero in breakdancing in Paris. But I wasn’t looking for it when it happened to me all those years ago. I was just doing the best I could with what I had, which wasn’t very much.”
