THE WORLD powerlifting champion barely remembers the moments that define his career.
Rúnar Geirmundsson laughs as I recoil from the cause of his amnesia. It is a small jar of ammonia, at once cleansing and corrosive. Tears form and my throat burns. As Rúnar returns the jar to a bench my blurry eyes are drawn to the tattoo on the back of his head – the contorted red face of the devil squints from behind a tight fade.
‘Pretty strong, right?’ he says, nodding to the ammonia. ‘It increases your blood flow but also gives you this kind of blackout feeling. I don’t remember most of my lifts in competition.’
We are in Thor’s Power Gym, an austere industrial unit in Kópavogur. It is the place to explore the construct of a unique Icelandic mentality – the idea that Icelanders are somehow more driven or tougher than others.
The guttural croak of heavy metal rumbles through the air that smells rubbery and sweet. Rúnar uses a winch to roll two strips of thick cloth – like the ones boxers use to protect their hands – into taut coils. He unravels them around his knees, grappling and tightening as he wraps. Satisfied that his joints are secure, he totters to the bar. He rubs his hands along the metal, releasing a wispy cloud of chalk that settles on the black floor. Rúnar grunts through the final set of squats in his Wednesday workout. The vein on his left temple dilates as lactic acid rises in his thighs.
Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson is the owner of the gym. He gazes menacingly, arms crossed, from a poster on the wall. Box-set gorgers know him as Gregor ‘The Mountain’ Clegane from Game of Thrones, but acting is not his main focus. Hafþór won the 2018 World’s Strongest Man competition and has finished on the podium every year since 2012. He is a colossus of tattooed granite held together by steel wire. Thor’s Power Gym is where the giants train. And they train hard. Icelandic athletes have been crowned the World’s Strongest Man nine times. Americans are the only nationality to have won more, with 12 titles.
Rúnar became the International Powerlifting League (IPL) world champion in Las Vegas in 2017. He also works as a photographer, manages a clothing label and is about to join an Australian deathcore band as guest vocalist on the European leg of their tour.
‘That’s the Icelandic way,’ he says. ‘We work way too much. That’s how we’re brought up. Your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, all of them worked really hard because life was tough here, man. Really tough. That sticks in your genes.’
We talk in the kitchen, on leather sofas that lost their showroom sheen a long time ago. We are away from the tractor tyres and boulders in the gym but far from comfort. That is not the purpose of this place. A tub ominously labelled ‘Dark Matter’ stands beside the Nescafe on the surface.
Rúnar’s routine revolves around being stronger and better than the day before. He wakes up at the same time, always. He goes to sleep at the same time, always. Between training, eating, massages and physiotherapy, there is little time for frivolity.
‘I’m turning 27 and I’ve been powerlifting competitively for 11 years. I have no social life, man. You won’t see me downtown. You won’t see me at parties. I’ve never tasted alcohol in my entire life. I don’t know what beer tastes like. I don’t know what cigarettes taste like. Whatever substance it is, I’ve never tried it because I’ve always been on a mission.
‘People go to Ibiza after they graduate and shit like that. I’ve had no time for that. My social life is in the gym. I probably haven’t experienced as much as other people my age, but I think I’ve done cooler stuff. I get to travel the world doing what I love. I want to build a legacy. When I’m dead I want people to know who I was, so I guess I’ll have to sacrifice those little things.’
Rúnar has a phrase tattooed across his forehead, just behind the hairline. ‘I’ll rest when I’m dead.’ He takes it literally.
‘I just wanted to be something other than what I was: a little kid in the west. I grew up on the western peninsula, my parents ran a prison, and it’s hard to get out of there, you know? I wanted to be something different. That’s why I’m covered in tattoos. I want to be something different.’
He settled on powerlifting. ‘You don’t get any help from the government. No money. Nothing. It’s all about you and what you do. I like going the hard way and thriving against all odds. I like that.’
Does this relentless pursuit of notoriety and fulfilment become lonely? ‘I’m lucky enough to have a fiancée who supports everything I do. If I didn’t have her it would be lonely because you do all of that and, when the day is done, you’re lying in bed alone.’
Rúnar has endured a frustrating few months. An elbow injury has prevented him from training fully. Although he comfortably squats a barbell that droops on each side with the weight of the plates, inactivity has sapped his strength.
And the moment he became world champion – the achievement of his life – was anticlimactic. He explains in his itinerant mid-Atlantic accent:
‘I always said that when I became world champion I would be happy, I would be finished, ecstatic. I was chasing that for 11 years, and actually it was kind of disappointing. My brother was with me. He was celebrating, fucking holding me and jumping around. I was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is good.” But I didn’t think it was good. It was the end goal, but it didn’t finish how I wanted. I didn’t get the numbers I wanted. It was bittersweet. More bitter than sweet, I think.’
The realisation dawned on Rúnar. What now? Was that it? All that graft for an underwhelming moment experienced through an ammonia-induced fog? He recalibrated and looked to the long term.
‘I think one year ahead or five years ahead. That’s the time span I think in. I don’t think about next week or next month. I’m really patient.’
Like the other Icelanders with a penchant for pumping iron, Rúnar displays the mental qualities that Angela Lee Duckworth – professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania – identified in studies of successful Ivy League students, cadets at the West Point Military Academy and even Spelling Bee maestros. They all had grit, which she defines as ‘passion and perseverance for very long-term goals’.
Duckworth elaborated in a TED talk: ‘Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.’
Grit is intangible and thus difficult to quantify. Duckworth developed the ‘grit scale’ in an attempt to do just that. It is based on self-assessment questionnaires, which are prone to contaminate grit with ego. Nevertheless, Grétar Steinsson would score high. The former Bolton Wanderers full-back grew up in Siglufjörður, a low-rise fishing town on the melancholy north coast. He joined Fleetwood Town as sporting director in January 2015. Shirtsleeves now cover his tattoos but cannot conceal his cauldron intensity that lassoes you into listening.
It is Monday morning at Fleetwood’s pristine training ground. The club sacked the head coach, Uwe Rösler, on Saturday evening. I expected the interview to be cancelled. Yet after ten minutes of pacing the on-site restaurant with iPhone to ear, Grétar talks for over an hour with little prompting.
He tells a story from his childhood. ‘There was one guy from Siglufjörður who always wore shorts. All year round he wore shorts. He would take me mountain running. I was 14 or 15. My body wasn’t developed to do this distance running. But he would take me out mountain running and I built this threshold for never stopping.’
Grétar applied that capacity for endurance to football. His friend’s father managed the sports centre in the town. Grétar was always in there, always trusted to turn off the lights and pull the cover back over the swimming pool.
‘I was very young when I said, “I’m going to be a professional footballer.” That was the mentality I had. I would cut out interviews with players. I had a sticker of Eiður Guðjohnsen on the wall and loads of posters. I was just obsessed with football. Absolutely obsessed.
‘I was very much about competing, winning, practising. I kept a diary every day. If I went swimming, I wrote how many lengths I did. I was absolutely obsessed with everything. I don’t know how the people in the town saw me. Probably as a bit of an oddball with a raging temper.’
Grétar’s parents accepted that their fiercely driven son was not for turning, so they prepared him for life as a footballer. ‘I was very young when my family said, “Right, if you want to become a footballer you need to learn to live like one,”’ Grétar recalls. He would have to move abroad to play professional football, so his family encouraged extra work on foreign languages. He now speaks English, German and Dutch. Young footballers live alone, so his family coerced him into cleaning and laundry. Footballers need good nutrition, so they taught him to balance carbs and protein. Grétar’s mother did not allow him to leave Iceland before graduating from school. She taught her son to finish what he had started.
Grétar made his first move as a teenager. He crossed the country to ÍA Akranes, then the strongest club in Iceland. It was the right environment at the right point in his development.
‘Akranes was probably the highest-performing town I’ve been in. The competition was fierce. I wasn’t just competing against local boys, who were very good, but also against professionals, former professionals, top foreign players who had been brought in. Not winning was not an option in that town.
‘I was fortunate in that the principal of the school was also part of the football club. I probably had the lowest attendance. If one of the local boys was in the gym, I would skip class and go to the gym. It was non-stop. You had to win. You had to perform at the highest level. That was where I developed, it was that grit of, “You’ve got to succeed,” otherwise you’ll get stamped on and kicked out.’
He was still in Akranes at 22. Still semi-professional. Injury and restlessness would have lured less gritty individuals to make irrational decisions. Grétar, by contrast, turned down foreign clubs because they did not fit his long-term goals.
‘I declined a lot of clubs,’ he says. ‘Stoke City made an offer and I declined them because I didn’t want to play in the Championship. Guðjón Þórðarson, who was the manager at the time, said, “Who the fuck do you think you are?”’
Stoke had Icelandic owners, an Icelandic coach and a strong Icelandic contingent in the squad. It would have been the easy move.
‘I wasn’t big-headed, but it didn’t fit my plan. I always had a plan and a tick box of what I wanted to do. I never claimed I was the best, but Stoke didn’t fit the plan. At the time I was very athletic, very fit, very mentally strong, but technically and tactically I wasn’t very good. It was my belief that if I went to Europe, to Holland, and added those things to what I already had, I could play in the Premier League.’
And so it turned out. Grétar joined Young Boys in Switzerland and then AZ Alkmaar in the Netherlands. He worked on the weaknesses in his game and in 2008 progressed to the Premier League. Passion and perseverance for a very long-term goal.
Grétar’s phone and notepad remain untouched on the table. He says something illuminating as, in the background, the Fleetwood squad trot out to begin their warm-up beneath the beady stare of three circling seagulls.
‘We’re a confident nation. We always believe we’re going to win Eurovision before we enter it. And we’re a growth-mindset nation. We just believe that we can succeed. We’re a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with 333,000 people. But we still believe we can achieve anything.’
It is significant that Grétar identifies a growth mindset in Iceland. Carol Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford University, coined the term after studying thousands of students in the United States. People with a growth mindset – as opposed to a fixed mindset – believe ability is not innate and that we can improve with effort. With the appropriate opportunities and support we can change how intelligent we are. People with a growth mindset view setbacks as a prompt to work harder, rather than confirmation that they are not good enough.
There is relatively little research on how grit is developed. But, as far as Angela Lee Duckworth can tell with the available information, establishing a growth mindset is the best way to create a gritty culture. Her research shows that, although there is no correlation between talent and grit, growth mindset and grit go hand in hand.
This is particularly clear in Iceland. While other countries reward ability or talent, Icelanders praise mettle. Football coaches often accompany staccato applause with a shout of duglegur when a young player has done well. Parents use the same word when their toddler takes its first steps or says its first words. Literally translated, it means something will ‘suffice’ – it is enough. But duglegur has come to encompass determination, hard work and bravery. In essence, it means grit.
Conscientious parents, teachers and coaches around the world devour literature that explains how to nurture a growth mindset in children. In Iceland, the traditional vocabulary does the job organically.
Another phrase cuts deep into the Icelandic psyche: þetta reddast. It is used to express faith that everything will work out well in the end. It was a coping mechanism when long, bitter winters whipped Iceland. People had to believe that problems would work themselves out and solutions would present themselves. That belief was all that kept insanity at the door.
Þetta reddast remains a prevalent attitude to life. A 2017 poll conducted by the University of Iceland revealed that 45 per cent of Icelanders live their life according to the saying. There is a strong belief in the idea that if the right effort is applied, things will fall into place. It is easier to accept setbacks with this attitude to life.
Grétar and Rúnar are salient examples of a common character type: gritty, driven, single-minded. Grétar sees his reflection in a lot of his fellow Icelanders. Iceland’s past reveals why these characteristics have sunk into the nation’s self-perception.
This is a passage from Guðrún Guðmundsdóttir’s autobiography. She was born in 1860 as one of ten siblings, five of whom died in early childhood. Guðrún recalls the moment her eight-year-old brother died suddenly in bed while she was tending to their baby sister:
I raced around the floor holding the baby and crying. I harped on the same sentence again and again: ‘I want to die too. I want to die too.’
‘Maybe you will,’ answered my mother. That was all she said to comfort me. Next my father was fetched and Bergur, my little brother, was put into an appropriate position. I did not see my parents cry and I did not cry for long. Thereafter, my parents went to work in the vegetable garden and I was left with the baby and the corpse.
Her experience is representative of many that Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, a social historian, encountered in a study of 240 autobiographies written by Icelanders born in the late 19th century.
The landscape was a malevolent force that teased its inhabitants. A lack of useful land meant each farm was isolated by necessity. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions struck periodically, often resulting in famine and disease. The North Atlantic was perilous for those who scraped a living from the open deck of a fishing boat. Death was another part of life.
Guðrún’s exposure to infant mortality was the norm rather than the exception. Children watched the most important people in their life die before their eyes. They were left alone, with scant emotional support, to process the grief. It is little wonder they sought refuge in the pages of a book, where the narrative provided an escape and the neat lines of text a semblance of order. But the reality was bleaker than the world described on paper.
Children worked on the farm from the age of five or six. This involved minding sheep, often at night and far from the dim lights of home.
Sigurður Jónsson, born in 1863, explained the exasperation:
When I was nine years old I had to round up the sheep, which were milked every day, but they were difficult to deal with. They usually wandered well into the interior. In these areas I had many tears.
When a sheep was missing, I was always sent out again in search, often into the night. Sometimes the search was unsuccessful and I could not find the sheep and it had totally vanished. My father, who was very insensitive, once sent me out in the dark and thick fog, while the others went to sleep. I started to walk and cried and threw myself down a short distance from the farm.
Sigurður’s mother sent a farmhand out to fetch him.
Meanwhile, popular tales about trolls, elves and other creatures that went bump in the night were all regaled while the family worked the wool. Such stories intensified the torment. Children were conditioned to fear the dark nights and all that they hid, but the darkness was exactly where they were sent.
The environment broke some children but others thrived. Many of the peasants in Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon’s study reflected fondly on their formative years and emerged with a psyche shaped by the Sagas – a belief that they could take on the world and anything it might throw at them. Icelanders who grew up playing football on gravel pitches, in all weather, often have a similar attitude. They see their youth as arduous yet necessary to chisel grit into their character.
Although Guðrún and Sigurður were born in the 1860s, life for most Icelandic people did not significantly change for another century.
Arni Helgason, born in 1914, blamed strenuous work for the two-year bout of polio he suffered from the age of ten:
I was only six or seven years old when I started helping in the baiting shed, baiting fish lines. It was cold and hard work. I am convinced – though it has never been proven – that it was working in the baiting shed that did it for me. As a boy I worked for hours on end baiting the lines and stacking the tubs. It was a heavy load for a young child to have to bear.
It is not too crude an oversimplification to say the Second World War provoked a period of rapid change in Iceland, as the economy benefited from Allied occupation and Marshall Aid. Up to that point, everyday life remained the same for many Icelanders. Housing and sanitation remained poor, for example. Over 50 per cent of houses were made of turf in 1910, and that figure still hovered at 11 per cent in 1940.
What does this have to do with football? More than it may appear.
Footballers do not exist in a vacuum. Where their parents and grandparents come from matters, because we are products of the society we are part of. The values of our culture and the people around us have a profound effect on who we are. The grandparents and great-grandparents of current footballers grew up in extremely primitive conditions, with stoicism and industriousness placed on a pedestal.
Those values remain relatively undiluted in contemporary Icelandic society. Hard work is venerated. Teenagers spend a large chunk of their summer holidays working on council-sponsored employment schemes – planting flowers or picking litter from verges. Many of their parents work more than one job. Irina Sazonova, the Russia-born gymnast who represented Iceland at the 2016 Olympics, held down three jobs while she prepared for the tournament: coaching in a local gym, delivering pizzas and cleaning hotel rooms.
Footballers embrace the values that sustained Iceland for centuries.
Matthías Vilhjálmsson spent his youth in Ísafjörður, in the extreme north-west of Iceland. In the winter he practised overhead kicks with the cushion of a two-metre layer of snow. In summer a farmer let the local boys play in a field among grazing sheep. Now Matthías plays for Vålerenga after several seasons at Rosenborg, the dominant force in Norwegian football.
‘We think we’re quite tough,’ he admits. ‘There’s a “never give up” attitude, no matter what happens. That’s our culture. The life we live.
‘The quality of life is much better now than in the early days, but we still have these real working-class people. My father still lives in Ísafjörður. He’s worked on a shrimp farm for 20 or 30 years. Before that, he worked in fishing. He leaves at 6.30 in the morning, comes home at 4.30, and never complains. So if I were to complain about having two sessions in one day, he would slap me, for sure!’
Quality of life has certainly improved in Iceland. By almost any measure, from social mobility to happiness to poverty levels, Iceland ranks as one of the most affluent and equal societies in the world. Yet this does not validate the myth that Iceland is classless. Sarah Moss – a British academic and writer – worked for a year at the University of Iceland in the aftermath of the financial crisis. In Names for the Sea Moss reflects on a perception among Icelanders that inequality is something that happens elsewhere. Some students told her that there was no class system, but perhaps this alienation from poverty proves Icelandic social inequality. The chasm between middle class and poor is so great that the existence of the poor is news to the middle class. While it is true that Moss’s time in Iceland coincided with a period of acute financial strife, when food bank use and other markers of social inequality were starker than usual, her observations remain important. Iceland is a good place to live but not a classless utopia.
Because of its relative affluence, however, Iceland is not a natural setting for the accepted rags-to-riches narrative of the footballer. Diego Maradona, Pelé, and countless others relied on talent to claw themselves out of poverty and provide for their families in fiercely unequal societies. There is a sense that this arduous path creates a single-mindedness and determination that players from more comfortable backgrounds do not possess. Though there may be an element of truth to this theory, it is romanticised. Most footballers succeed despite poverty, not because of it. A budding teenager cannot flourish if there is no food on the table, nobody to lean on for a lift to training, or if he is working long hours to supplement the family income.
The vast majority of Icelanders are in a privileged position in that football is not a route out of poverty. Iceland is a wealthy social democracy that encourages all citizens to play sport and provides the infrastructure to do so. Yet this supportive background does not mean that Icelandic players lack desire. They draw it from elsewhere; from the harsh conditions, the entrenched values of hard work, and the knowledge that emigration is a necessary sacrifice in the pursuit of professional football.
Aron Gunnarsson, the Iceland captain, discussed motivation in a 2018 interview with the Reykjavík Grapevine.
Generation after generation, we’ve had to stick together to survive in harsh conditions. Darkness, wind and freezing cold. That breeds togetherness and willingness to stand up for each other when it really counts. I’m proud of those roots. I’m proud to belong to a country built by hard workers who did what they needed to do to survive. Whenever I pull on the national team shirt it reminds me to appreciate where I’m from and be grateful to those who were before me.
This idea that shared struggle breeds collective determination is not unique to Iceland. Luka Modrić – the Croatia and Real Madrid midfielder – explained the adhesive effects of the Balkan War in a 2011 interview with the Daily Mail.
‘You have to understand something about the Croatian people. After everything that has happened, after the war, we are stronger, tougher. What we’ve been through was not easy. The war made us stronger. We are not easy people to break. It’s hard to break us and there is a determination to show that. To show that we can succeed.’
Iceland and Croatia both manage to compete with far bigger nations. Perhaps there is something in the self-perception of hereditary mental strength.
‘Measuring mental toughness is the holy grail,’ says Daði Rafnsson, who is in pursuit of that elusive knowledge. Daði is the former head of youth at Breiðablik and a respected voice in the coaching community. Following a spell coaching in China, he is researching mental strength in sport for a PhD. He believes that hard work runs through Icelandic society as a golden thread, but acknowledges that in football the woolly notion of ‘guts’ is vulnerable to romanticisation.
‘Mental toughness is something that we supposedly have plenty of,’ he says in a soft baritone voice. ‘Every country makes its own myths and expectations. When the Iceland women’s team played Brazil here, you heard some of the players and coaches saying, “We’re better fighters than them. Our mentality is so strong.”
‘I’ve coached Brazilian national team players. They have an incredible mentality. Professional to the core. Incredibly tough. They could withstand many conditions that Icelanders could not. So what is this toughness we’re talking about?’
It is generally risky to ascribe national characteristics to a population. In the case of Iceland, however, it is less crude. The population is small and far more homogenous than Brazil, for example, where there are stark racial and social inequalities.
With that in mind, it is fair to suggest that Icelandic footballers would rank high on the grit scale. They have to be gritty. Facilities have improved, but artificial turf does not keep out the wind and rain. They must leave their friends and family behind in pursuit of professional football. They need an intrinsic motivation that others do not. That is not to say that Icelandic teams work harder on the pitch than their foreign opponents; rather that Icelandic youngsters grow up in a culture that equips them with the mental tools to make the most of their talent.
Siggi Eyjólfsson, the former technical director of the KSÍ, opened his eyes to this when he went to coach at Lillestrøm in Norway. Siggi divides footballers into three groups:
• Player One plays football because it is fun. He likes to be with his friends, but attendance at training is sketchy and he is not ambitious to improve.
• Player Two wants to be better. He wants to improve and is willing to do extra training to achieve that.
• Player Three wants to be the best. He structures his life around football. The coach has to drag him off the training pitch and force him to rest.
Siggi has coached in Norway and China. He played in the United States, Belgium and England. He thinks that Player Two and Player Three are more common in Iceland than in those countries. There are a lot of gritty kids with the perseverance and passion to pursue the dream of playing professionally and representing Iceland.
More research in this direction is necessary. Haukur Ingi Guðnason moved into psychology after a professional career that included a brief spell at Liverpool in the late 1990s. In 2006, Haukur Ingi asked 116 Icelandic footballers to complete a self-assessment questionnaire. The results were unsurprising. The respondents who had played for Iceland at senior level had better mental skills than those who only played for Iceland at youth level.
Research comparing Icelandic and non-Icelandic youngsters on the grit scale would be useful. Until research offers evidence to the contrary, my hunch is that a unique Icelandic mentality is a myth. Icelanders are just gritty. Footballers are two or three branches down the family tree from people who faced a struggle to survive in a primitive environment that dislocates the senses. Industriousness was, and remains, a core value. This culture cultivates grit. That, in turn, helps explain why Iceland produces a disproportionate number of professional footballers, weightlifters and musicians.
There is also another layer to the question of mentality. If Icelandic players firmly believe that they are mentally tougher than their opponents, does the reality matter? Icelanders are under the influence of a performance-enhancing placebo effect.
Diego Johannesson – known to all as Diegui – grew up on Spain’s ragged north coast. He is one of triplets born to a Spanish mother and an Icelandic father. Diegui plays for Real Oviedo in the Spanish Segunda División and made his Iceland debut in 2016.
In a cafe in an upmarket barrio of Oviedo, I ask Diegui if he believes in a specific Icelandic mentality. He pauses for a moment. ‘Clearly the population is small,’ he responds. ‘But it’s the Icelandic blood, it’s the Viking blood and I never give up on anything.’
He maintains eye contact. ‘I give all I have. If there’s a ball heading out of play and it’s clear that I won’t make it in time, I’ll try and stop it anyway. I think that is the basis of the success Iceland is experiencing right now.’
Icelandic exceptionalism is often framed as ‘Viking spirit’, which Aron Gunnarsson defines as ‘the spirit of Nordic people giving their all to survive in hard conditions’. It is about projecting an image of strength and virility to the world. Gunnarsson, with his shrubby beard and Old Norse tattoos across his chest and back, fuels this projection. Icelandic footballers are presented as modern-day Vikings – heroic ambassadors of the nation who use effective tactics to triumph against stronger opposition. They are not, however, the first group of young Icelandic men to have metaphorical horned helmets thrust on their heads. In a 2005 speech in London, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, then the president of Iceland, trumpeted the virtues of ‘young entrepreneurial Vikings’, the raucous financiers invading foreign markets. This rhetoric was pompous, vacuous and hubristic; the holy trinity of doomed political discourse.
There is no evidence that ‘Viking spirit’ brings any physiological or mental benefits. Players from Reykjavík and Rome and Riyadh will run just as hard. But in the stifling intensity of a match, as the clock ticks past 90 minutes, if a player believes he can draw extra energy because of Viking blood, the veracity is unimportant. The player has gained an advantage regardless.
The placebo effect can reach the opposition, too. Tim Sparv captained Finland to a narrow victory over Iceland in 2017. Over the phone from Denmark, where he holds the midfield for FC Midtjylland, he explains his perception of the Iceland team.
‘They all work for each other. It’s a real team effort. They might have one or two stars in their team but even they are really humble, hard-working. I think somebody who symbolises that would be their captain with the long beard. I mean, that’s how I see Icelandic people: strong, bearded, working hard and being very humble in what they do.’
If Icelandic players believe they are mentally stronger than others, and opponents also associate them with endurance and durability, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Icelanders think of themselves as people who can overcome adversity, which often leads to behaviour that fits this self-perception. Young players want to conform. It proliferates.
On an island where grit and a growth mindset have sunk into the rocks and stayed, the five words etched into Rúnar Geirmundsson’s scalp – ‘I’ll rest when I’m dead’ – are more doctrine than decoration.
Fishermen have a more acute understanding of this than most.