If asked about the family, Jakob Ingebrigtsen (21) closes in the round.
This is a curious paradox, because until four days ago the family had been everything for this midfield genius: his stories traveled –and still travel– the social networks. We can watch them through YouTube, in capsules broadcast in Norwegian with English subtitles.
Dozens of chapters, spread over five seasons, have allowed us to follow the family's adventures. Team Ingebrigtsen, produced by NHK, makes us think of the Kardashian saga.
Or in King Richard, the biopic of Venus and Serena Williams.
(…)
Jakob Ingebrigtsen refuses to talk about the family because the project has been deconfigured. Gjert, the father of the six offspring, has let his youngsters fly.
Gjert no longer directs them. Not, at least, in the way he had done so far. The father-son athlete relationship worn out, Gjert has gone into private mode. He is neither there nor is he expected.
Now the Ingebrigtsens train on their own.
And Jakob, of his father does not speak.
–We believe that it is better for everyone that he is just a father and a grandfather –he limited himself to saying a couple of months ago.
Jakob is the pearl of the family, the best product of the Gjert Ingebrigtsen factory. The mythomaniacs do not forget his irruption in the popular imagination, in 2018. While still an 18-year-old teenager, with a face pockmarked by juvenile acne, Jakob Ingebrigtsen had appeared at the Berlin Europeans to achieve what no one had achieved before, not even Bannister , neither Coe, nor Ovett, nor Cram: sign the double 1,500-5,000.
Et voilà, that was going to provoke millions of applause and timid criticism.
–This kid is skipping too many stages, he is burning –a few commented on social networks,
–Whether burning or not, what he has achieved is already unique. Let's value it, right? - His defenders answered.
Time has proved the latter, their defenders, right. Well, far from going out, the flame of Jakob Ingebrigtsen has been growing year after year to make him the world benchmark for middle-distance, the universal indoor record holder of 1,500, the Olympic champion and the world and European multi-medallist.
Gjert has a lot to do with all of this.
Gjert had been a visionary.
Camera in hand, he had been collecting and editing the adventures of his creatures since the kids were very young. Jakob was a brat who walked behind Henrik and Filip, the older ones, skating through the corridors of an underground car park. The kids woke up like this, skating in the garages, preparing to be cross-country skiers, and then they went to school and then, after classes, they came back to the parking lot.
All this is told to us by the saga, Team Ingebrigtsen: the recordings reveal that the boys were going for cross-country skiers, the national sport in Norway.
(Henrik, the oldest, would go on to become the junior national champion of the discipline)
The recordings also tell us, however, that athletics was more in Gjert's heart. Athletics generates more money. And above all, it generates more international projection.
To analyze its real possibilities, Gjert Ingebrigtsen and his wife, Tone, had commissioned Leif Inge Tjelta, a Norwegian physiologist:
–Explore my children, and then tell me what you see.
The exploration of Tjelta was going to be hopeful for some and painful for others: two of the six children would be discarded. They did not measure up, they were not worth it for athletics. Martin, one of the discarded, appears in the series: resigned, he accepts his fate, the role of his sidekick in a saga of super athletes.
Henrik, Filip and Ingrid's abilities were magnificent, but Jakob was out of range. At just eleven years old, he recorded VO2 max consumptions (the rate of oxygen consumption in maximum effort) similar to those of an elite cyclist.
With the data in hand, Gjert Ingebrigtsen rubbed his hands together. He rolled up his sleeves and devised a plan: he set out to turn his children into legends.
The consequences were stupendous. Henrik was proclaimed European champion of the 1,500 m in 2012. Filip would emulate him in 2016. Jakob would emulate them in 2018.
Team Ingebrigtsen explores those moments and also Gjert's outbursts of anger, his Stakhanovist and at times, overwhelming work; the rebelliousness of the children, who face each other, stimulate each other, challenge each other, succeed and also fail.
Today, with Gjert out of the spotlight, the Ingebrigtsen's trajectories show diverse drifts. While Henrik and Filip go out, victims of their multiple injuries and setbacks, and while the teenager Ingrid gives up (in recent months she has left athletics), the figure of Jakob flies over the stage, ready to reconquer the world middle ground as in his day the greatest had done it: Coe, Cram, Morceli, El Guerruj, Gebrselassie.
(Only one athlete has achieved the world double 1,500-5,000: Bernard Lagat, in Osaka 2007)
The series of 1,500 starts this morning, starting at 3:30 a.m., Spanish time. Mo Katir, Mario García Romo and Ignacio Fontes are the Spanish options.
