Origins of the North American Vasa are in Sweden
The Swedish Vasaloppet, an 85-kilometer race attracting thousands of skiers and and billed as “the last great adventure of our time,” is an event with a history dating back to the sixteenth century. In 1518, a young Gustav Eriksson Vasa tried to lead his fellow Swedes to rebel against their Danish invaders. When his plans were exposed Vasa was imprisoned, later escaped and returned to Sweden where he was met with half-hearted support. Deciding to flee to neighboring Norway, young Gustav carved a path through the Swedish forests wearing snowshoes or short, broad skis. Near the village of Salen, at the Norwegian border, he was persuaded to return to Mora by a group of farmers who had decided to take up arms against invaders. He then returned to. Lead the Swedish liberation and was eventually crowned King.
Four hundred years later, a Mora native, journalist Anders Pers, conceived the idea of a ski race to commemorate King Vasa’s journey across the Swedish countryside. The first Vasaloppet was a 90-kilometer course from the village of Salen to Mora, on March 19, 1922. A twenty-two year-old lumberjack, Ernst Alm, won the race out of a field of 119 skiers. He covered the winding track in 7:32:49, a time which was a full hour ahead of what race organizers expected for a finishing time. With this race, the Vasaloppet tradition was officially launched.
For a quarter of a century, the Vasaloppet remained an exclusively Swedish run race, regarded as a historical and political event as well as a great sporting spectacle and challenge. A ‘vigorous effort in the present, expressing homage to the past.” By it’s fiftieth anniversary in 1973, the race attracted over eight thousand skiers from over twenty countries and four continents.
Other aspects of the race have also changed since that first run. The racers’ speed along the famous route of Salen to the village of Mora, depends on the state of the track and snow conditions. And actual changes in the course, in addition to advancing technology in gear, have also helped quicken the pace. Those first one hundred nineteen contenders broke their own tracks through the forests and open fields on that day in March of 1922.
In the village of Mora, the first racers to lead the twelve thousand competitors across the finish line are welcomed by the sweet sound of the traditional birch bark trumpets resounding from the bell tower and the cheers of thousands of spectators who arrive each year to witness what Sports Illustrated once dubbed, “The oddest, craziest, most agonizing, yet most prized of all modern sports events.”
Taken from the 1991 Vasa Commemorative Program, Author Unknown
The Entry of King Gustavus Vasa of Sweden
The Many Lives of Gustav Vasa
What does a Traverse City cross country ski event have to do with Irish and American struggles for independence from England and the early fight for the abolition of slavery? More than you might think.
North American Vasa skiers are justly proud of their connection with Sweden’s Vasaloppet.
This annual 56-mile cross country ski race commemorates the legendary flight of Gustav Vasa in 1521 from the Stockholm Bloodbath that killed his father and at least 80 other Swedes. The Bloodbath was part of a plot by King Christian II of Denmark to expand his control of the Swedish people.
As the story goes, Vasa fled on skis trying to rally forces against the Danish King’s power grab. He almost had to ski as far as Norway, where he planned to take refuge. There his previously lukewarm but now brave countrymen caught up with him and joined forces to fight the Swedish War of Liberation. The skiing may be a legend, but what’s certain is that their victory established the nation of Sweden with, of course, King Gustav I on the throne. Besides founding Swedish nationalhood, King Gustav Vasa is also credited with bringing the Protestant Reformation to his country.
So much for the original story, but Gustav Vasa lived on as a symbol of national liberation on two centuries later and far beyond the borders of Sweden. In 1739 Irish author Henry Brooke wrote a famous play, Gustavus Vasa, the Deliverer of His Country, with obvious parallels to the oppression of Ireland by the Bri?sh. The play was banned in England because Prime Minister Robert Walpole thought the villain resembled him. Guilty conscience, Sir Robert?
Undaunted, Brooke took his play back to Ireland, where it was published and later staged as The Patriot in Dublin. It was republished in 1761, 1778, 1796, and 1797, and was at last legally staged in London in 1805. Not surprisingly, the play was popular in the American colonies during the Revolu?on and in the newly independent US.
Concurrent with Brooke’s plays is the rise of another real Gustavus Vassa. Olaudah Equiano was likely born in what is today Nigeria in 1745 and was certainly enslaved by Europeans. At the age of about nine, he was sold as a personal servant to Michael Pascal, a lieutenant in the British navy, who named him Gustavus Vassa. Was Pascal sympatheticc to the Irish cause or just being ironic? We don’t know. The extra s in the name wouldn’t be unusual; spelling was inconsistent in 1754.
After at first resisting the name, Olaudah accepted it. Gustavus Vassa was the name legally assigned to him by the British and the name he used on his manumission papers, when he had earned enough money to buy his freedom at the age of 21 in 1766. It was also the name he used in public and private most of the rest of his life.
He may have come to embrace the idea of the original Vasa as a liberator of his people because he took on that role himself, identifying with the Sons of Africa, an abolitionist group of Africans living in England. By the 1780s he was a leading speaker in the Bri?sh aboli?onist movement. He helped expose the infamous 1781 Zong Massacre of 130 enslaved Africans on a slave ship. (When water ran low because of naviga?on mistakes, the victims were thrown overboard, and the owners of the ship claimed their insurance on the lost “property.”) Vasa also spoke out for the British working class and against the poor living conditions of formerly enslaved Africans who had been in Sierra Leone.
Vasa’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vasa, the African, Written by Himself, published in 1789, became the prototype of the freedom narrative for formerly enslaved Africans in the US and elsewhere. He was probably the first to write such a story by himself, without the aid of white ghost writers or editors. The book was very popular in England and the US, went through seventeen editions between 1789 and 1827, and was translated into Dutch, German, and Russian in Vassa’s lifetime. Its sales enabled him to prosper as an English gentleman and, more important, made him an internationally known advocate for abolition until his death in 1797. Ten years later Britain outlawed the slave trade in no small part because of his autobiography and his actvism.
Conclusion
Shakespeare’s Juliet asked, “What’s in a name?”
In the case of Gustav Vasa and his devoted followers in Traverse City, quite a bit. So, Vasa devotees, the next time you step into your skis, take some inspiration from all the history behind you, and maybe the course won’t seem so long.
written by John Getz, PhD, Cincinnati, Ohio