Background
Jan was born in Joesjö, Storuman Municipality, Lapland in 1956. Stenmark's family moved to Tärnaby near Norway when he was four years old.
Jan was born in Joesjö, Storuman Municipality, Lapland in 1956. Stenmark's family moved to Tärnaby near Norway when he was four years old.
Stenmark began skiing at Tärnaby at the age of five and won his first national competition at the age of eight. He trained from the age of 13 with the Swedish junior national team and won his first World Cup race late in 1974. He enjoyed his greatest season in 1979, when he won 13 individual World Cup races, bettering the season record of the French skier Jean-Claude Killy (12 races in 1967).
At the 1976 Olympic Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria, Stenmark won the bronze medal for the giant slalom, and at the 1980 Games in Lake Placid, New York, U.S., he won gold medals for both the slalom and giant slalom competitions. He became the first Scandinavian to win the Alpine World Cup. He repeated the victory in 1977–78.
Stenmark, a perfectionist by nature, preferred the precision of the slalom events to the all-out daring of the downhill, an event he seldom skied. With the rules change in 1978 setting a maximum number of points for specialty skiers, he did not win the World Cup overall title thereafter, although he continued to win World Cup titles for the slalom and giant slalom events. He retired from the sport in 1989. At the time of his retirement he had won 86 World Cup races, more than any other skier.
Quotations:
"I don't know anything about luck, but that the harder I train, the luckier I get."
"To win, I have to get angry. My anger is directed at the course, at attacking it and beating it."
"I ski to win. When the day comes that I can't get myself into a fighting mood anymore, I won't be able to win and I'll stop racing."
Stenmark was married to Ann Uvhagen, a Lufthansa airline hostess, 1984–1987. They have a daughter, Nathalie, born 1984.
In 2016 Jan married his girlfriend of some ten years, Tarja Olli from Jakobstad, Finland, with whom he has another daughter, Iza, born 2008.
