SAINT-QUENTIN-EN-YVELINES, France — Scan the Instagrams of any of the 10,000 Olympians here in France and you see much of the same kind of imagery. Selfies with the rings. Snaps with other cheery athletes. Geo-tagged stories from the gymnastics. But Madelene Stavnar’s Instagram looks a bit different. It features mostly her father’s forearm.
Her father’s tattooed forearm.
Madelene, a 23-year-old Ladies European Tour pro who is representing Norway in these Games, and her father, Thor, enjoy making side bets on her golf. A little action on the action. Five or more birdies in a given round, he’ll buy her something. If she makes a double bogey, she owes him a coffee. This year, at the Ladies Italian Open, Madelene opened with a four-over 76. That night Thor made an offer:
“Her dad was like, ‘If you make six birdies or more, I’ll buy you a dress,’” her caddie Jamie Tipper recalled. “Eagles counted double.”
Say less. After mostly sputtering on the front nine, Madelene made two eagles and a birdie on the final six holes to make the cut and earn that dress. (She ended up getting a pair of hiking shorts instead.)
These little wagers are the product of a life in golf — a sport where longest drive, closest to the pin and sandies (par or better from the bunker) are often worth a little something extra. But none of those wagers compare to the one she made with her dad six years ago. As a 17-year-old doing what 17-year-olds do, she dreamed about a big future and typed out an offer, titled “Kontrakt for tatovering til OL.”
Norwegian for Contract for a tattoo for the Olympics.
“This contract,” the document continues, “promises that Thor Stavnar will tattoo the Olympic rings when his daughter, Madelene Stavnar, represents Norway.
“It doesn’t matter what year this happens, but the first goal is 2024. Thor can choose the size and location of the tattoo himself. A breach of this contract will lead to a conflict between both parties. Therefore it is best to stick to the agreement.”
The “Contract for a tattoo for the Olympics”Instagram.com/MadeleneStavnar
You can feel Madelene smiling in the words.
She checked her spelling, printed the agreement, signed it and had Thor notarize it himself. Then she hung it above the doorway of her bedroom.
“I’ve seen it every day since the day we signed it,” she says. “It’s always been in the back of my mind, and when we knew we were close this year, he was like, ‘F—king hell. This is too close.’”
To qualify for the Olympics, golfers need to be one of the top-two ranked players from their country (unless they’re in the top 15, which allows for as many as four) and also to be ranked, roughly, inside the top 320 in the world. Inside 300 has often gotten it done, so long as you’re one of the two best players from your homeland. At the time the Stavnars signed the bet, she was ranked outside the top 600, and plummeting.
Madelene had turned professional at the young age of 16, after a surprising ninth-place finish at Ladies European Tour Q-School. She still had two years of high school to finish but had earned the right to a full season of playing privileges on the LET. It’s difficult to pass that up if you’re a dreamer. If she would play well, she’d launch a career and never look back.
“Combining high school with professional golf was way harder than I was expecting,” she says now. “My first year was actually pretty good, but I think I was just so tough on myself. The next year was brutal.”
So brutal she missed every cut. In 15 starts on the LET and its feeder tour in 2018, Stavner never once made the weekend, dropping from 638th in the rankings to 745th, then to 888th. Somewhere in that dismal stretch, she dreamed up the contract.
“It must have been my idea, because he would not have come up with that himself. Like, he does not want a tattoo.”
For a while, Thor had nothing to worry about. In 2019, Madelene make just one cut in a world-ranking-accredited event. In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic decimated playing opportunities for pro golfers everywhere. In 2021, Madelene had just one top-25 finish.
“It was probably mostly mental,” Madelene says of her former struggles. “Of course I would say my technique and my skills are better now. They’re more stable. But I could have played good golf back then, too. I just think I’ve grown up a little bit. I learned to trust myself and also my team. I’m getting a lot of help from my team. I’m probably more open in my communicating.”
Here, her caddie was nodding knowingly in the background.
“I don’t know what the main thing would be, but maybe just understanding that this is a rollercoaster of a lifetime,” Madelene continued. “It takes time. It’s rough out there.”
Golfers often struggle to pinpoint what pulls them into valleys, and they similarly struggle explaining what pushes them back toward peaks. It’s never one thing, always a confluence of factors. Maturity, experience, skill, the people around you. But shortly after the Tokyo Olympics came and went, Madelene began seeing success again. In 2022, she notched her first top 10 in years, and then contended for her first title at the ‘23 Ladies Swiss Open, finishing solo second, pushing her ranking up to 373th.
That’s when things started getting interesting for Thor, a father delighting in every step of his daughter’s success. Every good result made the potential for his first tattoo more real.
“He was tracking it,” Madelene says, laughing. “Like he’s got a whole map back home with papers from the different players and rankings and their results for the past year.”
In February, at the Lalla Meryem Cup in Morocco, a T7 finish pushed her into an Olympics qualifying position. Four nervy months later, a period during which she slid back outside the top 300, it was official: Madelene had qualified as the 59th player in an Olympic field of 60, a missed cut or two away from delaying her dream another four years. The Stavnars were going to Paris, but first Thor had to Google the nearest tattoo parlor.
Last week, ahead of their trip to Paris, Thor plopped down in a chair at Retrospect Tattoo and Piercing Studio in their hometown of Tønsberg, about an hour’s drive south of Oslo. He had the five Olympics rings printed on his white t-shirt and an outline of them stenciled on his right forearm. Madelene was there to capture the moment, but they weren’t alone. Her mother, Anne, joined. As did her caddie and her niece, who fashioned an identical, peel-away tat in solidarity.
This week, Thor is reveling in all that Paris has to offer. He and Madelene’s mother, Anne, have been taking selfies in Versailles, riding a riverboat on the Seine, hiking the steps of Sacré-Coeur and the Eiffel Tower. All with a little more ink on his body. And why wouldn’t he soak it up, now that his wager is paid off? Now, the only person in Madelene’s camp with something to lose this week is her fiancé, Jonathan.
Their bet is simple: If Madelene plays her way onto the podium, her future husband will be getting her a dog.
Sean Zak is a senior writer and author of Searching in St. Andrews, which followed his travels in Scotland during the most pivotal summer in the game’s history.
