In our research, athletes in Norway showed high interest in entrepreneurship, driven more by innovation and social impact than by income. Norway’s safety net takes some of the fear out of failing, so the main barrier sits elsewhere: a lack of technical skills, cited by almost half. You can read more in our post on how the barriers differ by country.
Two of the Norwegian stories in our training kit are about skills too, of a kind sport trains without naming: how to weigh a risk, and how to describe what you can do. The stories are built from public sources, and the athletes are not involved in the project.
Aksel Lund Svindal: risk is a calculation
Aksel Lund Svindal won two Olympic gold medals, five world championship titles and two overall World Cup titles in alpine skiing. He retired in February 2019, at 36, and moved straight into several things at once: investing in startups, launching a sustainable clothing brand and writing a book. He is an investment partner at Norselab, focusing on impact-oriented technology startups.
He has been clear in public about what he carried over. The first is calculated risk. Taking risks is necessary, but each one needs a reward that justifies it, the same way he pushed harder at his peak because the reward was worth it. The second is transparency. Sport, he has argued, is compelling because results are measured in the open, and business works the same way: the data shows where you succeed and where you fall short. He has described telling the teammate racing after him at the 2018 Olympics exactly what had gone wrong on his own run.
The kit’s lessons: risk is not a feeling, so ask what the reward is and whether it justifies what you are exposing. And report your failures accurately and quickly, because nobody else can fix a problem they cannot see.
Birgit Skarstein: a second identity built alongside the first
Birgit Skarstein is a Paralympic champion and a six-time world champion in the single sculls. She has also competed in para cross-country skiing. Her public life has run in parallel with her sport rather than after it. She has served on Oslo City Council and on the Norwegian Biotechnology Advisory Board, and she was elected to the International Paralympic Committee’s Athletes’ Council in 2018 and re-elected in 2022.
She co-founded the WE foundation, which works for the inclusion of people with disabilities in sport, working life and society, and she describes herself as a social entrepreneur. She also names the skills she carries into that work: radical transformation, problem solving, resilience and strategic thinking. In the kit’s reading, that list, not the medals, is what transfers.
The kit’s lessons: board seats and committee work build your network before you need it, name your transferable skills out loud, and build the second identity while the first is at its peak. The kit also notes a gap: the sources it found do not document how the foundation is funded or run.
Read the full stories
Both stories are in the training kit, with the sources for every fact and two reflection questions at the end of each. Skarstein also appears in our post on identity after sport.
ENTREMIND is an Erasmus+ Sport partnership co-funded by the European Union (project 101229842).
