Vasaloppet

Even before he began the Vasaloppet (Vasa Run), Sweden's gut-racking cross-country skiing championship, Farmer Gunnar Larsson had good reason to feel discouraged. He had tried the 50-mile grind in eight previous races and never finished better than fourth. Now he was 35, and the long trail that led from Saelen, near the Norwegian border, to the small town of Mora, deep in the picturesque province of Dalecarlia, looked tougher than ever. Weather on the course veered from dim to foul. At the starting line, mist lay heavy over the hilltops, and skis had to be waxed carefully for cold snow. Later the trail wound into warmer valleys, and Gunnar would have to stop and wax all over again. Downhill slopes, where he might ordinarily have picked up time, were sticky with moist new flakes.

But neither Gunnar nor any other ablebodied Swede would consider quitting the Vasa Run until legs or lungs gave out. For the history of the race runs all the way back to the start of Sweden's independence. It began in greater discouragement than Gunnar or his competitors ever knew. In the bitter winter of 1520, Gustav Eriksson Vasa, then 24 and a fugitive from a Jutland prison, came to Dalecarlia with news of the "Stockholm Blood Bath," a mass beheading of Swedish noblemen with which Christian II, already King of Denmark and Norway, had celebrated his coronation as ruler of Sweden. The political slaughter had been designed to stifle Swedish resistance to the Union of Kalmar, which bound together Sweden, Denmark and Norway under one crown. But when the Dalecarlian peasants refused to believe young Vasa's tales of terror, he gave up hope of leading a revolt. Defeated, he strapped on his snowshoes and started the long, cold shuffle to Norway for refuge.

After Vasa left, other fugitives arrived with word of Christian's massacre. Aroused at last, the peasants sent their fastest skiers to catch Vasa. These couriers stopped him only 20 miles from the border, the present site of Saelen. Now the Vasa Run commemorates his return, the start of the revolution that freed Sweden.

So last week Gunnar Larsson started from Saelen just as Vasa did, with hope. He pushed steadily across the wooded hills and frozen streams of the irregular land. Before the race was over, more than 100 exhausted skiers of the 583-man field had quit, but Larsson, as usual, stuck it out. On his ninth try, he swept first across the finish line near a statue of King Gustav Vasa that marks the spot where the young revolutionary harangued the Dalecarlian peasants four centuries ago. For one year, until time for the next Vasaloppet, Gunnar Larsson will be Sweden's No. 1 sporting hero.

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