Ör Íþróttum: The Arrow Athletics Story

[Prydania]

 

[Prydania]

1964
The University of Beaconsviði Experiment

1960s Prydania- the boom period. Fascist Wars? Done, over. Social Commonwealth? A bad nightmare. King Rikard VI? Been dead for years. His successor? His liberally minded son, King Robert VII. The fascists were dismantled, the power to select the Alþingi returned to the people. Soldiers returned home. They had babies. Democracy was free and open. And Prydania reconnected on the world stage. And that meant investment. The economy grew as peacetime and scientific advancements led to greater crop yields. The service industry in the bigger cities and towns began to grow. Mining, farming, automobile manufacturing. Prydania was a tiny country on the top of the world, but it was a place where you could make it.

Páll Riddari was one such person who made it. The year was 1964, and the third year journalism student/track and field athlete at the University of Beaconsviði had just sold his first pair of Ör Íþróttum (Arrow Athletics) shoes. It had taken a year to get to this point though.
Páll had a problem in 63. In fact all runners for UB's track team had problems that year. The university had installed a new urethane track. Traditional metal spikes from cleats tore the new surface up, and didn't provide much traction. And the university, which had spent a lot to install the damn track, warned the team to switch out shoe types. Problem was availability. Specialized track shoes for a variety of surfaces could be pricey, and not every uni-aged student could afford a new set. Páll's solution? If you can't afford new shoes, make them!

Well it was a bit more complex than that. Páll and his track team friend Bolli Bakkmann began thinking about a solution to the broader problem. Not just needing new shoes, but new shoes that would work on a urethane track- as well as dirt and grass. Even bark chips! All of their problems- not just the immediate one- would be solved. Páll was a journalism major- he knew what he wanted, but making it was something else. Bolli though, was majoring in chemistry. And he had a solution. His girlfriend, Bára, had just bought him a waffle iron. The idea he had, as Páll openly mused about his ideas- was too good.
Bolli grabbed the waffle iron- and Páll- and made his way down to the university lab. He poured the components of urethane into the waffle iron and presto- the rubber spikes were born. The pair constructed the rest of the prototype and realized they had something when they tested it; the rubber spikes didn't tear up the new UB track and they adjusted to all surfaces.

So fast forward. 1964. Páll and Bolli introduce Arrow Athletics. The name came from Bára, actually. She was a competitive archer. Bolli later stated he felt naming the company after her in some way was only fair- since they'd destroyed her gifted waffle iron to make the first batch of shoes!
They sold the shoes- at an affordable rate- to their track mates. The shoes took off. Not just among UB's track and field team, and not just among track and field athletes in Prydania. Basketball players, weekend hikers, moms who ran every other day to burn some spare calories- by 1972 the shoes had taken off. So much so that Bolli and Páll had chosen not to pursue their degrees beyond the undergraduate level. They were in the shoe business.


1978
Take Aim and the Legend of Lambert Fugl

The 1970s were more of the same. The economy was strong, the countryside was peaceful. And the cities were places where anyone with an idea could prosper. Arrow was prospering. They had stopped selling shoes out of the back of Páll Riddari's van by 1969. They'd dominate the sportswear market in Prydania ten years later. How? Lambert Fugl.

But first...
Hockey. Hockey is Prydania's national sport. The country's league may only have six teams, but I dare you to find any other hockey club in the world that has fans as dedicated as those six teams. So much so that each team incorporated their own "Athletic Clubs." You had each hockey team that ran rowing clubs, cycling clubs, racing clubs, football clubs, and basketball clubs. Ah basketball.

Hockey is hockey. Good luck displacing that in Prydansk. Basketball though...
It wasn't the most popular sport in Prydania, but it was the coolest.
Rewind to 1973 and the rookie season of Lambert Fugl, power forward for Midland Basketball Club. The non-hockey wings of these broader clubs often drew from local talent, and Fugl was no exception. He was a mechanic's son from Jórvík, signed right out of high school. His father couldn't afford to send him to university, but if Midland Hockey was willing to pay his son a decent wage to play for their basketball club while he figured out what to do with his life? Why not?
Thing was Fugl was dominant. He had a killer instinct on the court and was unapologetically brash. He exploited an advantage basketball had over hockey that basketball didn't even knew it had- in hockey the ice is surrounded by boards and glass, and the players wear helmets that obscures their faces. In basketball the fans are right up against the court and you can see ever expression every player makes. Fugl's trash talking, his aggressive style of play, and his colourful expressions as he played made his games a sensation. By 1976 the small arenas and gyms that hosted Prydania's basketball circuit- including a converted corporate office building in Haland- were packed. Fugl and Midland's rivalry with Katarínus Júl and Keris helped drive interest. Basketball never overtook hockey but it didn't need to. It captured the youth culture, the counterculture. Its symbols became the symbols in Prydanian popular culture.
And what brand of shoes did Lambert Fugl wear? Arrow Athletics.

The 1978 Finals between Midland and Keris saw Fugl and Júl lead their team to a combative five game series, with Midland winning a close game five to win its third championship in five years. And there was Lambert Fugl, talking to reporters from RÚV 8 with an Arrow Athletics track jacket.

1984
You Can't Have Counterculture if Culture isn't Organic

Prydania's economy began to slow down in the late 1970s. It was then that the cracks beneath the post-Fascist War recovery began to show. Prydania had never been invaded by the victorious Allies. The fascist Social Commonwealth government faltered in the face of national pressure to step down, and a broken and defeated King Richard VI didn't have the strength to insist against the national will.
Still...Social Commonwealthism was never defeated. Never discredited like its Andrennian counterpart. The diehards, and zealots, the true believers all just vanished underground. The economic slowdown though, caused them to come crawling out. Allowing them to claim that weak leadership had led not only to economic stagnation- but moral degradation! The counter culture movements of 60s and 70s Prydania brought a harsh reaction from hardcore fascists who decried the loss of "true Prydanian morals" and "true patriotic culture."
It wasn't just the far right that was spurred into relevance though. Radical elements of the Syndicalist Party began to agitate for social and political change. And soon...soon they and the SoComs began clashing in the streets.

Then it happened. The summer of 1984. A bomb planted by radical Syndicalists detonated, killing King Robert VII, his wife, Queen Loke, and their eldest son Crown Prince Baldr and his wife, Lisse. Additional assassination attempts against Robert VII's two other sons- Prince Anders and Prince Robert- proved less successful, but the country was thrown into shock. It was in that shock that Prince Anders ascended to the throne as King Anders III.
New Alþingi elections were mandated by a royal succession. Maybe it was Syndicalist involvement in the assassination of the King. Maybe they just didn't have PR that could make the revived Social Commonwealth Party when they claimed victim- even when they started an altercation- anytime a riot broke out. Maybe Stefan Toft just really knew how to connect to a crowd. Regardless, Prydania had a new king, and it had a Social Commonwealth Prime Minister.

The thing about culture, you see, is that it's organic. Or it should be. It grows from people, it grows from entertainment. It grows...from life. And in that way counter-culture is organic too. The two aren't actually enemies, despite the name. Culture and counter-culture feed each other. They dance with each other. They inform each other. And counter-culture was where Arrow made their money. It's what made basketball cool, what made Lambert Fugl a cultural icon, what made shoes suddenly a fashion statement and not just something you bought because you needed them.

All of that changed in the summer of 1984. Anders III and Stefan Toft. Truly a match made in heaven. Or hell, if we're being honest. Their autocratic tendencies lined up. Their belief in the need to revive "the patriotic Prydania" of ages past lined up. Prydanian culture- which had been evolving ever since the Loðbrók-led viking clans from Andrenne first began to interact with the Bayardi and AK- suddenly stagnated. These weren't just new fascists. These were fascists informed by their past failings, and they truly believed that culture had to be controlled if they were going to survive.

Of course other things led to Arrow's declining profile in the 80s and 90s. Governments not willing to do business with the fascist government in Prydania saw declining export sales. SoCom protectionist policies led to foreign consumers having less access to Prydanian goods. Beyond that though- when culture becomes curated it becomes empty. It's ironic in a way. The same cultural purity the SoCom fascists wanted to return was never pure. The Prydania they clung to from ages past was just as dynamic culturally as the Prydania of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet they didn't see it like that, being blinded by a nationalized sense of nostalgia.
Counter culture dried up. Popular culture became a barren wasteland of whatever the government promoted or deemed "suitable." And Arrow's appeal- as a lifestyle brand, as something you bought so you could have some attitude- vanished.

Bolli Bakkmann and Páll Riddari had never agreed politically despite their friendship and business partnership. Bolli was a Bandalag man and Páll voted Free Democrat. It's sad that one thing they could agree on- opposition to the Social Commonwealth regime- wasn't possible. It was in 2002 that the two admitted on Syndicalist Republic-run television that the Social Commonwealth government had threatened them into silence. To "make your shoes and shut up."

2002
The People's Shoes

The Social Commonwealth regime lurched until 2002, and the writing was on the wall. The opposition parties were agitating for change and the country was set on edge politically. No one knew what would happen next.

And then the Syndicalist Party gunned down most of the Alþingi. Most of the royal family was executed on live tv and suddenly over nine-hundred and seventy years of Loðbrók rule came to an end. Prydania was a Syndicalist Republic. Just another stop on the wheel of dictatorship.

Arrow was spared direct nationalization as a result of their reputation for fair labour practices and friendly relations with their Syndicalist-affiliated union. Instead the factories were nationalized and the union was brought under government control, but Arrow could exist as a "private firm" that leased the factories from the government. There was a catch though- Arrow's product output could be dictated by the government at any time. Bolli Bakkmann and Páll Riddari were spared the fate of death, imprisonment, or exile many in their situation faced, though their lives became very prison-like in their own ways.

Not much changed, of course. The early revolutionary excitement faded as it became clear that a Syndicalist dictatorship was just as keen on keeping power as the Social Commonwealth dictatorship they had replaced. Perhaps even more so. The SoComs of '84 had been smart- they understood the past. And they knew what they needed to do to hang onto power. They managed it as long as they could through brutal repression. The Syndicalist Party had to harden or it would die, and it did the former.
A brutal authoritarian state of the leftist variety was no more conducive to the free flow of ideas than an right wing authoritarian state, and Arrow quietly sat there, making cheap shoes, cheap athletic wear, and not innovating. Not like it used to.

2017
Aiming Upwards

The private firm arrangement lasted until 2008. Bolli Bakkmann and Páll Riddari- both aged sixty-four at the time- were forcibly bought out by the government. Arrow reverted to state control and the two were essentially placed under house arrest in Beaconsviði.
Arrow continued under state management, with a number of its factories switching to military footware as the government began to be dragged further and further into the civil war with the various Royalist militias that had sprung up in the wake of the 2002 coup. Arrow goods on the open market became scarce as the Syndicalist government pushed further to a war footing.

The war ended in the late spring of 2017 with a restoration of the Loðbrók dynasty, but not the SoCom dictatorship. Prydania's new government opened the nation up again, dismantling the cycle of party dictatorships that had begun in 1984. Bolli Bakkmann, however, didn't live to see the very end. He died of a heart attack during the Battle of Beaconsviði at the age of seventy-three. Bára, just two years younger, joined Páll in taking back control of the company. Páll sold out in exchange for compensation for the nationalization in 2008 while Bára chose to forgo said compensation to keep control of the company.

Bára Bakkmann now controlled the company that was named after her archery from her younger years, and she set out plans to revive Arrow. Cheap shoes were manufactured for those who had next to nothing following the fifteen years of fighting. Bára took the company back to its roots, making cheap but reliable shoes that weren't flashy but did the job. Arrow got a new logo two years later, symbolizing a sense of renewal. An archer aiming an arrow upwards.

Where is Arrow Athletics now? It's not chasing its trendsetting days. That's not in the cards just yet. It is transitioning though. From cheap shoes for people who have nothing to specialized athletic footwear once more, as the economic situation improves. In a country where sport is an escape from the horrors of war? And where wounded national pride focuses on what it can call its own? Arrow Athletics is there. Once more a presence on the soccer pitch, the basketball court, or in track and field. It will grow in time. Like the country whose opportunity made it possible back on that track in 1964.

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