Little Walter grew up on the slopes and taught himself to ski-jump He was World Champion by the time he was 21
Little Walter grew up on the slopes and taught himself to ski-jump He was World Champion by the time he was 21. Steiner now lives with his family in Sweden outside the little-known town of Falun. What drew him to such a place? He points up at the huge ski-jumping ramp on the hill overlooking the town. He used to compete here.Steiner's hair is shorter now than when he appeared in Herzog's film, but with his thin face, long nose, and big, mournful eyes, he still has the same distinctive, Eyeore-like presence – part martyr, part clown. Just as Herzog was intrigued by Steiner (later giving him a cameo, alongside Fassbinder, as a drunken farmer in his film, Kaspar Hauser), Steiner is fascinated by the filmmaker."We had something which is kind of similar We dream and think of things different from everybody else We go a little above the clouds," Steiner reflects. "I used to dream that I fly in slow motion; that I fly over these hills and sometimes I'd land very soft and when I tell this story [in the film], he chose [to show] my flight, and it was just like it was in my dreams."To be a good ski flier, capable of leaps of up to 200 metres, you have to be able to conquer your own fear, he says Nor does he believe that it can be taught. As a former coach of Eddie "the Eagle" Edwards (the hapless British jumper who became a folk hero during the 1980s) he should know."I tried to make it easy for Eddie, but when he was on the take-off, everything was empty in his head because he was afraid He was like a worm with thousands of legs.
If he thinks with which leg he has to make the next step, then he can't go any more. What was very bad was that he got so famous from being bad – the Americans and Canadians made him such a hero. It's nothing to do with Eddie, but with the people who make a hero out of a joke."Herzog's documentary helped Steiner achieve a level of celebrity beyond that of any of his fellow ski jumpers. Nonetheless, he wasn't altogether happy with the documentary. Herzog, he believes, was so keen to portray him as a ski-jumping visionary, misunderstood by the judges and made to put his life at risk to titillate the public ("I felt I was in an arena in Roman times and that people wanted to see how I crashed," Steiner acknowledges), that he missed what was really going on in the background.Steiner agreed to make the film primarily to draw attention to the fact that he believed the ski-flying hills were badly (and dangerously) designed. But Herzog fails to acknowledge the point, instead suggesting that it was Steiner's phenomenal ability that put him in danger.
In 1973, Steiner had broken the world record by 10 metres, but his jump hadn't been accepted because he had jumped too far. If he had gone a few metres further, he would have landed on the flat and that – Herzog surmises – would have meant "certain death". Herzog uses this incident as his starting point, and the film goes on to show Steiner competing at Planica in Yugoslavia Again, Steiner is jumping too far. Absurdly, he is obliged to start from a shorter run than anybody else for his own safety.Steiner spent years lobbying the FIS (The International Ski Federation) to re-design the ski-flying hills They ignored him. He was a lone eccentric pitted against a powerful international body representing the interests of those who had spent millions building the hills he was attacking.
