And today’s mornings remind them of the sporting days of long ago.
No, not with muscle soreness. The back, the damned back, which has had to survive hundreds of tons of iron being hoisted while training in the gym. It has had to survive the crushing hours of grunt work. In pursuit of a golden result…
Thinking of Olympic champion Erika Salumäe, too. Before and after, together with Urmas Ott, during the making of Salumäe’s books.
A.K.
P.S. This story was written on the threshold of the new year 2002. For several reasons, understandable ones too, it has never seen the light of day. At least not in print. I think that although they are not direct heroes of our portal, in the broader picture they are heroes forever. In the memory of Estonian sport… Recent events point provocatively back to what was written earlier. That is why the original version of the two-man story is published here as well. A.K.
The portal’s editorial team also offers its condolences to the family of Lauri Aus, who passed away in July, in particular to Kristel, three-year-old Artur and almost one-and-a-half-year-old Alex. They have no reason to be ashamed of the name of their husband and father.
THE SHARP REMARKS OF THE HEALTHY…
You want your child to become a top athlete.
Do you really?
Even after the memoirs of Antson, Tamm, Salumäe, Talts?
You still do?
You are strong, and so what is written here won’t shake you.
But it should give the doubters and the fence-sitters something to think about.
Lauri Aus.
Born 1970.
Pro cyclist Lauri Aus has been in the grip of injuries for a long time. Now he is asking himself whether it might be time to quit altogether, having barely passed 30. Two years ago Aus, a pro in France, went under the knife of Dr. Eldur Annus in Estonia.
After the sciatic nerve operation he felt relief. The only hard moment was coming out of the anesthesia. And sitting afterward was painful.
The bottom line: fed up with health troubles, for half a year it was a run over rocks and stumps, and now (Nov. 2002 – ed.) life should finally get going…
It didn’t. At the start of this winter the knee is fine, but that same sciatic nerve still makes itself felt. Two years ago Aus had a knee tendon operation. It helped. One of Jaan Kirsipuu’s most solid helpers, he dragged himself through the season somehow. In an interview given to Postimees he admitted he was just some kind of bread tin and nothing more.
And he did sign a new contract with the bosses.
Naturally, the salary figures were no longer what they had been a year earlier. But he was an authority in the team and a good person in general.
Yet one thing is remarkable about him: the desire is even greater than ever before.
But is desire alone enough?
A man from the Jõgeva area, Kalev Raudsepp, the former coach who taught Lauri from the age of 11 and whose own sons are in the big cycling carousel, still looks at the matter with hope: “I think Lauri will stay afloat. Otherwise there would have been no point in going so far and so high in the first place.”
I remember a moment in San Sebastián in October 1997, when Aus crossed the finish line seventh at the World Championships (an unusually high place for an Estonian in this discipline). I remember his pro’s gaze as he answered journalists. The day before, I had seen the same while talking with Miguel Indurain, the Spanish icon and five-time Tour de France winner.
Will Lauri Aus continue in 2004 as well?
Only HE HIMSELF knows the answer.
He knows it and he’s doing it. Still.
Aavo Pikkuus.
Born 1954.
Olympic champion 1976, world champion 1977, individual and team gold at the Peace Race 1977. Estonia’s best athlete in five different years.
He is a great champion. Just born at slightly the wrong time… About 15 years too early.
As an Estonian Dynamo athlete, he had to fight the evil demons of army sport. Why Aavo wasn’t picked for the team at the 1980 Moscow Olympics is clear even to a hedgehog: the team sent after Olympic gold was not allowed to include a single Olympic champion. Otherwise one of them might have turned out better than Viktor Kapitonov, the gold medalist from Rome and a bronze medalist. The head coach himself saw to it that such a thing didn’t happen.
Pikkuus today?
He has twice undergone surgery for a pituitary tumor. After his car rally career, he lived through misfortune in business: a fire, plus a colleague’s cash robbery in his employer’s back room.
And he still strives.
As a father of four, he can’t imagine it any other way.
Life is harsh enough as it is, and it has put its stamp on the family too. The sensible conduct of the children and of his spouse Laine has been like a warm tailwind. But essentially Aavo threw his health onto the scales of fate long ago. There, in his days on the Soviet Union national team.
In spring, summer, autumn.
In winter too. At a time when it would have paid to reflect on the future, and was necessary.
But knowing Pikkuus, I can’t picture him as a master of compromise. As a foolish little lamb who would stop in front of obstacles. His style was to go not over the wall but through it. Not around the mountain but over …
That is exactly what he had made himself into.
Trained.
Competed.
That is exactly what he has remained.
19 medals from the championships of the then unbreakable Union, a dozen of them gold, are the mark of his passage. As for becoming Estonian SSR champion, there was less time for that, so he did it fewer times.
Pikkuus’s mark, brand and price.
Price?
Exactly – everything you do has a price.
Today it turns out to be too high.
A man who finally dreams of a calmer life doesn’t, however, stay in bed in the mornings in spite of fate. He goes to lead training sessions. He looks around lovely Tähtvere the way Joosep Toots once did on his home turf. He himself, alas, doesn’t climb into the saddle. Those three decades younger do that. Born “at the right time.”
Does he tell them: “Boys, hold back? Save yourselves for a healthier middle age. Look at cars with a sharper eye. At traffic in general.”
Hardly.
Then this man wouldn’t have become Legend Pikkuus.
Author: Aare Kreilis, Vaatleja
Come work out! ArtGym
