In Norwegian, to backpedal in the figurative sense is to row: Åro. We make our discursive retreats not on a bike but in a vessel. And, really, the idiom is less overtly about retreat. More than a backwards motion, it evokes a mad dash towards land. To get elsewhere, anywhere but the awkward place we’ve cast ourselves with our careless speech, we use arms and oars at full, frantic force. I’ve tried to make a rule of not backpedaling, since it pretty much exclusively makes matters worse, but as I struggle to live by my own rules, I occasionally leave interactions in a ramshackle dinghy, desperate and graceless.
The idiom has been on my mind since the second week of the World Cup, when I first became aware of the Norwegian team’s post-game rowing ritual. That I’d remained oblivious to the rowing for that long seems inconceivable to me now. But then again, I didn’t see a single group stage match. Ahead of the tournament, I had intended to catch all of Norway’s games. The only other sporting event that stirs up a comparable collective excitement—what Norwegians call a folkefest—is the Winter Olympics. Those weeks are always a good time, but the folk don’t fest as hard in February as they do in June.
My commitment was tested when I found out about the time slots of our first group stage matches: Norway–Iraq started at midnight Oslo–time; Norway–Senegal started at 2 AM. Most people I talked to seemed unbothered by the start times. After all, it’s the first time in twenty-eight years that Norway has qualified. Plus, the government has compensated for the time difference by temporarily permitting bars—which normally have to stop selling alcohol by 3 AM at the very latest—to keep tapping half litres all night. In the end I decided, knowing full well how lame it was, that I’d rather show up to work well-rested than take part in the revelry. Given that I’ve never in my life lost sleep over sports, missing the matches didn’t feel like much of a sacrifice. Besides, I got a small taste of the festivities anyway. The night of Norway’s first match against Iraq, when I was woken by the unusual amount of foot traffic under my bedroom window, there was no need to check the final score. Grateful to the singing, chanting passersby, I fell back asleep feeling that I’d gotten to have my cake and eat it too.
Over breakfast the next morning, a strange scene unfolded outside my living room window. A small group of boys, probably in the second or third grade, were sitting on the sidewalk at the edge of the park across the street from my building, basically just a grassy hill that leads up to a church and, behind it, an elementary school. The boys all sat in the same position, arms and legs sticking straight out in front of their hunched torsos as though reaching for their toes. Then, magically in sync, they straightened out their backs and pulled their arms backwards, as far as their elbows would go. After a beat, they launched their arms forward again. Having taught kids this age, I was impressed—getting them to do things in unison is no small feat.
Opening the window, I leaned my head out to get a better look at the troupe. This added a piece to the picture: Standing next to a lamppost, one boy faced his seated friends with a stick in his hand, apparently conducting them. When he hit his stick against the post, twice at a time, the boys on the ground would emit a low sound, some sort of single-vowel chant, and pull backwards. A few passing kids sat down to join them, each new recruit effortlessly jumping in. It was like they were all initiated in advance. I wondered whether this was some sort of choreography they’d learned at school.
The following week, aboard a tram crossing downtown Oslo, I overheard a tense discussion between two women, likely sisters. One found something embarrassing, while the other warned that viewing this something through a judgmental lens revealed frigidity and a lack of understanding. The latter explained that this unnamed something, which I was bent on deciphering, was bringing everyone together in a meaningful way, during what she described as a historic moment. “Å ro?!” the former snorted incredulously, rolling her R with particular emphasis—to row?!—and added that Norway would soon enough be rowing its way back across the ocean. I got off the tram and, just before the doors closed, heard the latter mutter something about jinxing it.
Having confirmed my suspicion that the two women were talking about the World Cup, I pulled out my phone. It was the day after the Norway–Senegal match, which my older brother had gone to see in person, flooding our family group chat with victory footage from MetLife Stadium overnight. (Though the jubilant shouts seeping in through my window at daybreak told me the result long before I checked my phone in the morning.) Walking down the street, I opened one of the videos my brother had sent. A huddle of players sat on the edge of the field, facing the Norwegian supporter stand behind the goal. As the huddle jerked backwards, an ocean of red flowed up the stadium as one collective wave. My phone was muted when I watched this earlier, but now the video played at full volume, revealing the low sound reverberating through the stadium with each new wave. It struck me that this was what the boys had been doing outside my window; even the sound they had been making, though at a very different pitch in the video, was the same. But the chant, I finally realized, wasn’t just a single-vowel utterance. It was an imperative: “Ro!”
Suddenly, rowing, which a Norwegian superfan came up with after Norway qualified for the World Cup last fall, was everywhere. Rowing videos were all over Instagram, fed to me by accounts I did and didn’t follow. Businesses seized on it in their advertising; bars invited customers to “come row with us” during the next game. I saw Ro for Norge!, apparently our new national slogan, written on the pavement in pastel chalk. Throughout that week, I was inundated with conversations like the one on the tram: Was the rowing embarrassing, did it matter if it was embarrassing, and wasn’t its corniness what made it quintessentially Norwegian? Was it nationalistic, did it matter if it was nationalistic, and why do we only ever brand ourselves as Vikings when foreigners are watching? On the news, talking heads discussed the rowing’s significance and speculated about why it had gone viral. My favorite theory came from a professor of marketing, who explained in an interview that, “things are difficult in the US these days. People are sad, and they’re well aware of how the rest of the world sees them. In need of cheering up, the US welcomes this phenomenon with open arms.” Although the slogan tells us to row for Norway, we were somehow rowing for America, too.
Norway’s final group stage match couldn’t have had a better slot: Friday at 9 PM. I made plans to see it with friends, wondering whether my excitement—after a week and a half of indifference—made me a supporter or a poser. In the end, I was neither, as I felt more tempted to join my parents at our cabin outside the city than to hype myself up for a sport I hardly ever watch. I canceled my plans and headed towards the central train station, elbowing my way through the buzzing red-clad crowds that had taken over the city.
“It’s a good thing everyone’s glued to their TVs, otherwise we’d be branded as traitors,” my mom said as we went for a walk along the fjord just after kickoff. We didn’t encounter anyone outside, but we did hear three rounds of despairing yelps and moans, likely triggered by the trio of goals France’s Ousmane Dembélé scored in the first thirty-two minutes of the match. Only once, when Thelo Aasgaard scored, did houses we passed sound jubilant. The second half of our walk was utterly silent, the air still, trapped beneath the heavy clouds hanging over the darkening fjord.
As we walked, my mom and I talked soccer, unfazed by our ignorance. We discussed the possible benefits—moral and strategic—of losing a game. After all, Norway had already advanced to the knockout stage after beating Senegal. Who knew (not us), maybe losing against France meant playing an easier team to beat in the next round? Our naive hypothesizing was interrupted by another series of discouraged shouts from the houses around us. After they died down, the conversation turned to rowing. “We,” my mom said, either embracing the custom of using the first-person plural when talking about sports teams or speaking on behalf of the entire Norwegian population, “better keep rowing!” This match was, she explained, an opportunity to show that we’re good losers, not just good winners. I nodded, wondering what a Viking would say about the notion of honorable defeat. It had started raining by the time we made it back to the cabin, where I looked up the final score: France had beaten Norway 4–1. My mom looked up whether the Norwegians had rowed through their defeat: They had.
The evening of Norway–Côte d’Ivoire, I lost track of time. When I hadn’t managed to get out of the house by kickoff, noon in Dallas and 7 PM in Oslo, I considered abandoning my plans again. Surely some part of me didn’t want to see the matches if I kept finding excuses to miss them. What was the point, I wondered, of seeing just part of this one. Rationalizing, I reminded myself that we’d now reached the knockout stage—this might be my last chance. I half walked, half ran downtown. It was a bright evening, the late June sun high in the sky, yet the city seemed deserted. For a while there was so little traffic that I ran in the middle of the street.
A few blocks from the restaurant where my friends were watching the game, the stillness of the city came to an abrupt end. Shouts of joy surged out of the apartments above me, joining the roar erupting from a bar on the other side of the street. My friends filled me in when I sat down a few minutes later: Shortly before the end of the first half, Antonio Nusa opened the scoring with an elegant shot into the top corner of the goal, replays of which I had plenty of opportunities to admire at halftime. I was surprised to find how much I had to say about the game as soon as the second half began. After a great save by our keeper, I grabbed my friend in awe, asking his name. “I have no idea,” she said, equally amazed. We were filled in by the girls sitting closest to the screen, who had evidently played and watched more soccer than those of us sitting in the back, and by the time he brilliantly saved a free kick in the sixth minute of stoppage time, we were both praising Ørjan Nyland as if we’d known him for years. It was only when Haaland scored Norway’s second goal, a mere tap of his left foot at the eighty-sixth minute, that I began to consider that this might not be the only game I would see after all.
Soon enough the team was taking a seat in front of the goal, preparing to pull the oars of their imaginary longship as Martin Ødegaard, the team captain, positioned himself in front of a red galley drum placed on the grass. Back outside in the now far from deserted city, only stragglers headed eastward with me; the crowd flowed west towards the palace square, singing, “Vi skal vekke kongen!”—“We’re going to wake up the king!”—to the tune of Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” I first heard this chant sung outside my window a couple hours after the Norway–Senegal match, and it had made much more sense at dawn. Though the king turns 90 next year, it was inconceivable that he’d dozed off during Norway’s first ever knockout-stage victory. But on the off chance that he was already asleep by 9:30 PM, the chanters may well have achieved their goal: That evening, seismographs at the University of Oslo registered a series of tiny earthquakes coinciding with decisive moments in the game. The strongest reading came shortly after the final whistle, as supporters all over the city rowed in sync, conducted by their captain thousands of miles away.
The following week, all anyone could talk about was Norway’s upcoming game against Brazil. On the one hand, we were meeting the most successful team in World Cup history, which besides holding the record for number of titles, is also the only team to have played in every tournament. However, though we’ve qualified for the World Cup fewer times than they’ve won the entire thing, the odds were technically in our favor: Norway has never lost to Brazil. Even I’d grown up hearing about Norway’s legendary upset of Brazil in 1998—a celebrated moment of not just Norwegian sports history but in our cultural memory more broadly. The friendly matches the two teams have played before and since that game have resulted in either a tie or a Norwegian victory.
The day of the game, my friends and I were less concerned about the Norwegian team’s odds of maintaining its streak than about our own odds of finding a place to watch together. Kickoff wasn’t until 10 PM, but after Norway’s biggest tabloid newspaper published a detailed article about how people had started lining up outside a viewing venue at 8:30 in the morning, we met up in the late afternoon with a list of places to try. Luckily, we struck gold at our very first stop, the spacious dining area of an art gallery on the edge of the Palace Park. With several hours to go, we brought our beers outside, took a seat on the steps, and watched the crowd accumulate—only then realizing that we basically couldn’t be closer to the palace square, where the city had gathered after every victory so far.
When I went inside for another beer, a projection of the 1998 Norway–Brazil game started playing on the big screen. It was just before kickoff, and there was something touching about the way the camera slowly, almost tenderly, passed over the blank faces of the Norwegian players as they stood lined up on the field—recording, for posterity, their sweet unawareness of the history they were about to make. Back out on the steps, I noticed a man show up with a fat stack of records, which he deftly balanced as he locked his bike. Shortly after, samba and bossa nova began streaming out through the open windows and doors, the beats and rhythms mixing with intermittent cheers for twenty-eight-year-old goals and saves.
In the final hour before the evening’s actual game began, the crowd gradually filed in and piled up inside. The charming grain and warm hues of the ’90s TV recording gave way to live pregame footage, the suddenly crisp resolution almost unsettling. The Brazilian tunes also came to an end, but when a familiar intro brought the speakers back to life, the expectant chatter of the packed room died down. A moment later, the gallery launched into presumably its first impromptu Jahn Teigen singalong, as friends and strangers grabbed hold of each other and bellowed the lyrics to “Optimist,” Teigen’s 1989 entry to Melodi Grand Prix, the Norwegian qualifying competition for Eurovision. After the jury snubbed the fan favorite in favor of another song, the incensed public kept “Optimist” atop the charts for weeks on end. Pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a late ’80s pop hit made for Eurovision, it sounds a bit like an ABBA song, just less polished and more wholesome. Though a large portion of the room would probably choose João Gilberto over Jahn Teigen on most days, today was an all-around exception, “Optimist” having become the unofficial soundtrack of first the Norwegian men’s hockey team and now the World Cup squad. I saw people tear up as they declared, with Teigen and the rest of the room, that they’re an optimist, that they know everything will go well in the end. The song ended, and I watched the players line up on the field as their predecessors had a couple hours earlier.
The room was in a frenzy almost right away, when it seemed like Patrick Berg had opened the scoring just a few minutes into the game—it was offside. Still, we had plenty of reason for celebration throughout the match, Nyland repeatedly saving Brazil’s shots. As the game proceeded deadlocked, the cameras would occasionally catch Haaland smiling goofily to himself on the field, like he knew something we didn’t. As it turns out, he did, breaking the score open by smashing the ball into the goal with a glorious downward header. It felt like we’d only just sat down again from our shocked, shrieking celebrations when, at the ninetieth minute, he scored again. The jubilation of victory completely overshadowed Neymar’s penalty kick deep into stoppage time, and we tumbled back out onto the grass in front of the gallery, everyone hugging, jumping, dancing, and laughing in disbelief while the players rowed on the screen inside. Cars and scooters slowed down and honked as they passed; a waving bus driver played us a little victory tune with his horn. Losing sight of my friends for a moment, I called out to ask where they were going. Multiple people around me, none of whom I knew, responded: “Til slottet!” “To the palace!” We were going to wake up the king—who I once again had no doubt was still awake—and began moving en masse across the street, between the honking cars, and in through the trees on the other side.
From the palace square, Karl Johans gate, a pedestrian street that runs a kilometer southeast to the central station, looked like a glittering red carpet that had been rolled from the top of the hill onto the city, undulating between trees and buildings. People climbed lamp posts and statues, waving flags and leading chants. Halfway down the hill, someone overeagerly beat a drum, the quickening pace, already too fast from the get-go, setting off spates of frantic, high-speed rowing that the seated crowd clumsily yet devotedly strove to keep up with. As we joined a Nyland chant that a group near us had been trying to get off the ground, we caught sight of some sort of large object coming towards us up from Karl Johan, moving across the sloped surface of the crowd. When it got closer, I realized it was an inflatable dinghy. Managing to stay afloat all the way up the hill, the boat’s sole passenger pulled the oars vigorously, as though the arms and hands lifting him up were waves.
On my way home that night, multiple groups serenaded me with a new adaptation of the “We’re Not Gonna Take It” chant: “Vi skal knuse England!” “We’re going to beat England!” They were jumping the gun in more ways than one—it was too early to say, or sing, who we’d be facing next, with Mexico and England still playing at that very moment. Still, only one of the countries has a name with the right number of syllables in it. Six days later, my friends and I stood beneath the awning of a bar, barely shielded from the pouring rain. It was halftime, but even though Jude Bellingham had found an equalizer during stoppage time, after the Norwegian players had missed a couple of opportunities to make it 2–0, spirits were high. Andreas Schjelderup had opened the scoring beautifully, albeit possibly by accident, looking simultaneously dazed and triumphant after the ball flew into the top corner of the net, his face still frozen in an expression of stunned pride when Ødegaard picked him up and paraded him around on the field.
A taxi pulled up near us, and as the passengers rushed across the street into an apartment building, one of them stuck behind and approached us. “Do you know what’s happening?” he asked with impassioned bewilderment, unconcerned that only half of his body was under the awning, his already soaked clothes getting even wetter. Before we could figure out what he had in mind, he answered the question himself: “Norway is playing England in a quarter final. Of the World Cup. We’re tied against England in the World Cup. Norway is playing so well. Against England! In the World Cup!” One of the girls from the taxi slipped back out of the building across the street and hurried towards us, holding a dripping sweater over her head. She apologized, pulling him away as he continued to tell us what was happening. “Come, Kasper,” she coaxed. He explained that he needed to stay here, he couldn’t leave before we understood how amazing it is that Norway is tied with England in a quarter final of the World Cup. “They know that, Kasper, now come.”
The rain had stopped by the time I walked home a few hours later. As I walked, I tried to channel Kasper’s wonder at how far we’d come, but it was hard not to fixate on contingencies and narrow margins, to keep from wondering how the game would have gone if the sensor in the ball had detected the camera wire before Bellingham’s equalizer, if Torbjørn Heggem’s goal hadn’t been disallowed, if the game hadn’t been played in a place and on a day with such extreme heat and humidity (the heat index in Miami Gardens was close to 110 degrees that afternoon), if the video assistant referees weren’t so annoying. Norway had objectively outplayed England for much of the second half, but after a certain point you could tell the players were utterly worn out. “They’re so tired,” said a girl behind me as the second half went into stoppage time, her voice brimming with affection for the Norwegian team. “Me too,” said her male companion. A little while later, at the start of extra time, the TV screen took on a mysterious tint. It was just after 1 AM; the laptop the game was being cast from had entered sleep mode. We watched Norway exit the World Cup in sepia.
When I reached Carl Berners plass, it struck me that the square was busier now, at almost 3 AM, than when I pass through it on my way to work on weekday mornings. And yet, though there were just as many people out and about as there had been a week ago, Carl Berner was quiet. The passing cars and buses drove on silently, and no one sang or chanted to each other from opposite sides of the street. Over the hushed traffic and murmur of people’s sparse conversations, you could hear the birds singing. A different meaning of ro came to mind now. When used as a noun, ro signifies an absence of movement or sound, a freedom from worry or disturbance, the state of being at rest. The noun features in the expression “Å slå seg til ro,” which can mean both settling down somewhere and accepting something. When used in the latter sense, the expression often contains a hint of grievance—though finding the situation difficult or dissatisfying in some sort of way, one has determined to make peace with it and settle down to stillness.
When I made it home at 4 AM, I noticed that my mom had sent a message to our family group chat: “People are still celebrating and rowing all over Norway!” Attached to it was a video from the palace square. It looked a lot like last weekend, except the sky was a paler, grayer blue and the crowd was smaller and more coordinated—when they rowed, they actually managed to do so in sync. In the background, I heard a familiar chant, but with a word switched out: “Vi skal trøste kongen!” “We’re going to cheer up the king!” Later, just as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard something strike metal twice, then a loud “RO!” I drew the curtain aside and peeked through my window. The street was completely empty. Wondering if I’d dreamt it, I closed the curtain again. We’d lost like winners, and now it was time to sleep.
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