Norway's Thorkildsen Gave up the Day Job to Concentrate on Getting 90m.

Olympic champion, Andreas Thorkildsen, has given up the day job to become a full-time athlete, according to Norwegian daily Aftenposten.

In conversation with the athletic federation’s Ketil Tømmernes, the paper revealed that pressure of training had led to Thorkildsen’s decision to give up the job he has had for a year in Oslo with DnB NOR, Norway’s largest financial services group.  The bank giant sponsors Norwegian athletics.

The 23-year-old from Kristiansand in the south of the country found that increased training had left him with little option. “Andreas found that to stay at the very top level he had reached demanded so much more than before,” said Tømmernes. “He has increased his sessions considerably and it became difficult to combine training with the bank job.” Adding to the problem was that with two sessions a day to get through, by the time he had finished the last session it was so late that there was no one left in the High Performance treatment room to help him recover. From Monday to Friday Thorkildsen now trains twice a day and once on Saturdays.

The man who set a World Junior record of 83.87m five years ago has had two dream seasons winning gold in Athens and silver on a rain-drenched evening in Helsinki last summer behind Andrus Värnik (EST). He was to finish second again in the World Athletics Final in Monaco to arch-rival Tero Pitkämäki (FIN), but was more than consoled by a huge throw of 89.60m, his fifth Norwegian record of the year and a personal best by 1.85m.