Eddie the Eagle lands at Charles Stanley Cambridge
It certainly wasn’t downhill all the way when Charles Stanley Cambridge, an investment service located at 3 Station Square, invited ski-jumper and Olympic legend Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards to give a talk.
The firm has recently moved offices and invited Eddie last Thursday (October 13) to help celebrate this fact. Ahead of his address, Eddie, who famously competed in the Winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada, in 1988, said: “I’ll be talking about my life as a ski-jumper many years ago from Calgary, and I’ll be showing a few videos of things and then just mingling and chatting to people.
He continued: “I speak at conferences, lunches, dinners, and these kind of things, which are very small, intimate events. There’s only about 30, 40 people but I’ve spoken in front of 10 people and I’ve spoken in front of 10,000 people so they’re all very different, and that’s how I earn my living nowadays.”
A few years ago, Eddie’s story was turned into a successful film, starring Taron Egerton and Hugh Jackman. Eddie said of it: “The film is pretty much spot on.
“I would say, in broad basic terms, it’s probably about 90 per cent true – because the only thing that didn’t really happen in my life that they put in the film was I didn’t get drunk and miss the opening ceremonies! But the rest of it was pretty good.
“It just happened in a slightly different order and that kind of thing and used different venues – they used Bracknell ski slope, whereas I learned to ski at Gloucester, it’s those sort of things... There’s a lot more truth to it than I first realised because they told me before the film came out that only a little bit of it was true.”
Eddie revealed that in the film the British Olympic officials moved the goalposts for him once to stop him from qualifying, whereas in reality they moved it four times – making his achievement of getting to the Olympics even more remarkable.
He added: “They only put the one coach in the film, whereas I had about 25 different coaches. But they took characteristics from most of my coaches and put it into the one character, so Hugh Jackman, my coach in the film, was pretty much an amalgamation of probably half or three quarters of my coaches because that was the easiest way to tell the story. They did an excellent job – it still makes me cry when I watch it.”
[Read more: 89 stunning new apartments coming to Station Square, Cambridge, Skeleton star Lizzy Yarnold to deliver Anglia Ruskin University lecture]
One of the most memorable scenes in the film involves members of Eddie’s family wearing knitted jumpers with the words “I’m Eddie’s mum”, “I’m Eddie’s dad” etc emblazoned on them. “My mum and grandma were prolific knitters and they all knitted jumpers, so all that was true as well,” said Eddie. “I think my sister’s still got all the jumpers. She should have sold them on eBay, she would have got a fortune for them!”
