PHOTO: Bildbyrån
Frank Andersson is one of our biggest sports legends.
He achieved great success and invented a lot of stupid things during his lifetime.
Like the time he won a surprising European Championship gold as a drunken 19-year-old.
It was a day of mourning when Frank Andersson passed away in the fall of 2018. He was only 62 years old and is remembered as one of Swedish sports’ great heroes.
Strulpelle Frank
He is considered one of Swedish wrestling’s most successful and he had a personality that charmed most people. But alongside the enormous successes, the good “Frankie Boy” was a real strulpelle who was drawn to problems and decadence.
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Already as a teenager he had a reputation as a “bad boy” in wrestling and he could never meet times or hardly even show up during competitions. An unforgettable example of the combination of success and darkness came in connection with the European Wrestling Championships in Leningrad in 1976.
Andersson drunk
The 19-year-old Frank Andersson had not been selected for the championship and chose to console himself with a surströmming record in Sundsvall that lasted for three days. And there was more focus on the nub than the fish for young Frank.
READ MORE: “Hoa-Hoa” reveals the truth about when Frank Andersson was going to buy milk and disappeared: “Nah, that’s how it was…”
All of a sudden, the wrestling legend appeared Pelle Svensson up at the party to announce that Andersson got a place in the EC squad at the last minute. Nor did it stop Frank from continuing the drinking on board the plane to Leningrad.
Won the EC gold
The wrestling icon is said to have spat between the matches, but despite that he swept the mat with the opponents and went all the way to the EC final where he would also win gold. It was Frank Andersson’s very first championship gold in his career, and afterwards he explained the success with two absolutely perfect words.
– The opponents probably fell for my bad breath, Frank Andersson told the newspaper Z.
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It was a very different start to a very successful career that ended in a total of seven golds and thirteen major championship medals. But even the problems and scandals continued for Frankie Boy throughout his wrestling career.
– Of course I go to the pub and fix girls. I like beer and girls. But what is so strange about that? All boys my age do that, said Frank himself in an old interview with Expressen.
READ MORE: Frank Andersson’s beautiful glint to the TV profile Bengt Magnusson after the WC gold
Someone who came close to Frank Andersson and got to experience the best and worst moments was the former national team coach Leo Honkala. He sums up his time with the late wrestling icon this way:
– I felt very sorry for Frank. He was so restless. He couldn’t stay alone in the hotels and always slept badly before the finals. Often I had to force food into him at the training camps. But he has some good sides, Frank – if you get him into life, said Honkala in the interview with the evening newspaper.
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