It was the video that shook the skiing world.
Now Calle Halfvarsson reveals the truth – and rages against Norwegian NRK.
– They made a mess, he says.
There have not exactly been a few times during his career that Calle Halfvarsson has ended up in the hood of Norwegian skaters. He has had many dust-ups with the super-profile Petter Northug, and has also been a real target when it comes to taunts from the neighbor to the west. And everything reached its absolute peak before the WC in Seefeld, 2019.
Controversial video
It was with two days left until the WC premiere that a music video was released on NRK’s website. There stood Calle Halfvarsson rapping, and he went hard on Petter Northug and Johannes Hösflot Kläbo. In the video, Calle Halfvarsson sings, among other things, that he “bathes in Swedish women’s breasts”, and later he also takes out a chainsaw and cuts the head off a cardboard figure of Johannes Hösflot Kläbo.
Calle Halfvarsson was severely cut for the music video, but the fact is that there is an explanation for how it was released – despite the fact that pretty much everyone thought it was over the line. Namely that Halfvarsson and the Swedish national team never got to see it before publication – despite NRK’s promise to the skiing star. The news about Calle Halfvarsson’s words about NRK has also reached Norway, where it is noticed, among other things, in the newspaper Dagbladet, which describes the whole thing as a “fury”.
– NRK had promised that I would see the video before publication. But they made a mess. They probably understood that it would be a no, especially from the national team, says Calle Halfvarsson to Expressen.
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“Didn’t belong there”
And he is absolutely right. Rikard Grip is now general secretary of the Swedish national biathlon team, but was then national team manager of the national cross-country team. He says he would “absolutely not” have approved the video if he had seen it before publication.
– For me, the most important thing then and there was that all the focus should be on the sporting achievements. Nothing else. This didn’t belong there, he says.
Calle Halfvarsson had to endure a lot of criticism, but today can “just laugh about it”.
– I got perhaps a thousand positive comments but three, four extremely negative reactions. They hurt me badly, he says, and continues:
– I remember thinking: “Shit, have I murdered someone or not?” That’s how the tone was, like I’d done something really, really terrible. But my God, it wasn’t that dangerous.
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