Nic Zwetnow

Nic Zwetnow was certainly one of the most colorful and multi-talented Norwegian Olympians of all time. One headline in a newspaper interview tells the story: “An artist with Pistol, Scalpel and Balalaika”. Zwetnow was born in Berlin in 1929 in a very turbulent period in European history. His parents fled from Russia 1917 after the Bolshevik revolution and settled in the German capital for some years, but came to Oslo in the 1930s, obtaining Norwegian citizenship. His father was a Cossack artillery officer, while his mother was descended from Georgian nobility. Nic completed his medical studies at the university in Oslo 1953, 17 years later receiving his advanced medical degree at the university in Göteborg. From 1979 to his retirement in 1999 he was a professor of neurosurgery in Oslo.

Zwetnow’s favorite sport was pistol shooting. He won several Norwegian titles, and was awarded the King’s Cup in 1963. He competed in rapid-fire pistol at the 1960 and 1964 Olympics, with his best placing in 1964, when he was 29th out of 53 competitors.

Zwetnow was also a highly skilled musician on his favorite instrument, the balalaika, and also played the piano. He performed several concerts with his balalaika, and made a LP record together with The Stockholm Symphonic Orchestra. Zwetnow mastered 10 languages close to perfection. His mother tongue was Russian, but he taught himself Arabic to get more out of another of his passions, his love for travelling around the world. Zwetnow died in Oslo in 2016, aged 86.