Norway’s World Championship javelin silver medallist and reigning 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.

With his sights set on breaching the 90m barrier, Thorkildsen is keen to keep the momentum going: “The most important thing is to establish myself at the level I am at. As long as I stay healthy in the future and if I throw as well as I know I can, a 90-metre throw can come at any time,” he said.

The immediate plan is to head for the sun and avoid the worst of the Norwegian winter. On Saturday Thorkildsen heads for South Africa where he will be based in Potchefstroom, an hour and a half from Johannesburg.

The base is nothing new for the Norwegian. It was here that he became acquainted with former World silver medallist Steve Backley while training for Athens. Thorkildsen’s coach, Åsmund Martinsen, paid tribute to the help his young charge received from Backley: “Andreas has benefited greatly from the experience of mixing with him.”

The aim this time round is to concentrate on technical training rather than throwing far. Thorkildsen will be accompanied on the trip by colleagues Ronny Nilsen and Paul Solberg and they will be supervised for the first half of the stay by Mathias Lilleheim until Martinsen arrives later on.

After major gold and silver in the last two seasons, Thorkildsen is very much in the vanguard of a new wave of young javelin throwers who will be around for a long time to come, and a 90 metre throw  would confirm that this member of the new generation really means business.

Michael Butcher for the IAAF