The 'spoilt kid' who lost it all and fought back

Andreas Mikkelsen's legs were shaking for the last few hundred metres of last week's Rally Sweden. He couldn't stop them. He didn't want to. He'd waited a long time for this. And now the time was here. A World Rally Championship podium was waiting.

Predictably, there was plenty of emotion at the finish. Granted, it wasn't the win it very well might have been, but it was still a massive, massive result.

Second. In a factory Volkswagen Polo R WRC... a massive result for a two-time Intercontinental Rally Challenge champion Norwegian on snow? Really?

You bet.

That result was about more than just finishing second in Sweden. When Mikkelsen got to the end of the stage - and onto the podium - that emotion really took over.

When drivers make the top three of the WRC for the first time, they often talk about what they've been through to get there.

For a 24-year-old, Mikkelsen has pretty much seen it all. He's had it all, lost it all and then realised that, actually, he'd lost nothing by comparison to what real loss means.

A 17-year-old Mikkelsen chats to Robert Reid during Rally GB in 2006 © LAT

Born in Oslo, it would come as no surprise that a young Mikkelsen took to the mountains on skis. Aged 11, he was equipped with six pairs of skis and would soon become a junior member of the national ski team. When motocross took over from skiing, he was bought three - not one - bikes.

At 16 he tried a Ford Focus RS WRC on a frozen lake. Immediately, he was super-quick. So his dad bought him a couple a cars. World Rally Cars, that is. And, after school, he would hammer them around the lake until they ran out of petrol.

Mikkelsen lived all of our childhood dreams.

"If I wanted something," he says, "I got it."

But then at the end of 2008, the global economic crisis hit home and pulled the fiscal legs from beneath Mikkelsen's benevolent father. The World Rally Cars were no more.

A year after he finished fifth overall in a Focus on the 2008 Rally Sweden, he was driving a national-specification Group N Subaru. Mikkelsen hadn't taken two steps back in search of one forward, he'd stepped back a mile with no guarantee of any further forward motion.

The boy who'd had everything was now faced with a very different life at the age of 19.

Mikkelsen had top-class machinery in the WRC when still in his teens © XPB

"I went into the mountains," he said at the time, "and I sat down and I thought about things. I thought about things for a long time."

It was at that time that Mikkelsen's friend Erik Weiby offered to manage him, a scenario he talks about in his deeply personal film I AM Andreas Mikkelsen.

"He came and told me that he really wanted to help me, but not to support me in the way that I had been supported in the past - by buying me the best cars," he says.

"He said: 'We'll do it my way: we start over and win the heart of Norwegian rally fans. We go back to the basic rally cars and try to beat everyone and then we can start playing.'"

Mikkelsen's well aware that his reputation wasn't the best when he exploded onto the scene as a World Rally Car-driving, national rally-winning 17-year-old.

"When," he says, "I got the best cars, a lot of people were saying: 'He's got the best cars - that's the reason why he's winning.'"

He's not wrong. And when it all fell apart, there was widespread expectation that we'd seen the last of this supposed spoiled-rotten rally driver.

What the wider-world couldn't have known is that Mikkelsen's desire to succeed in this sport ran way deeper than his father's pockets. Mikkelsen wasn't done yet.

He came out of the woods and into an Impreza, shorn of hydraulics and all the bells and whistles he'd been used to.

Mikkelsen and Mads Ostberg in 2009 when both were fighting for WRC recognition © XPB

Equal machinery.

Sink or swim?

Once he'd got used to life without fully active transmission and cutting-edge damping, he swam and swam strong. He won Rally Sorland and was setting class-leading pace on the WRC-qualifying Rally Norway before a puncture scuppered his event.

He was doing it. With Weiby's help, Mikkelsen was bringing people around.

Things were looking up... right before an accident cast every other hardship into the shade.

Mikkelsen went off the road on the second stage of Rally Larvik and collided with a spectator. Ten-year old Elise Kvernsmyr was killed in the accident.

Just three months out of his teens and Mikkelsen was left to deal with the unimaginable. The mother of the girl wanted to see him - she was waiting in the ambulance at the scene of the accident.

"I didn't know what she would do," he says. "I expected her to beat me up. But coming into that ambulance, she came over to me and she gave me the world's biggest hug. And the words she told me then... that's the reason why I'm still driving."

Mikkelsen carries Elise's name on his crash helmet. Never will he forget that September day in 2009. And every time he succeeds, he succeeds because of the strength of Elise's family.

Skoda UK gave Mikkelsen a chance and he responded with two IRC titles

And that's what made second in Sweden that bit more special.

Once he'd made the decision to get back in the car and found his speed again while chasing success in a private Fiesta S2000 in the IRC, his story took another turn for 2011, when he was signed by Skoda UK Motorsport - much to the chagrin of British rally fans up and down the country.

But Skoda UK's Cathie Sleigh stuck to her guns and backed her boy. And, having won the hearts of the Norwegian rally public, Mikkelsen did the same with us Brits. He scrapped home to take the 2011 IRC title and then romped home to back-to-back titles in '12.

In doing so, he bagged world rallying's golden ticket: Volkswagen's junior seat on a multi-year deal.

Last season was learning how to live life at the top. Now, lessons learned, Mikkelsen is expected to show some speed and - if all goes to plan - win some rallies.

His performance in Sweden was timely. There were rumblings, or at least the very beginnings of rumblings, that Mikkelsen might have slipped back into his privileged ways. Dare we say it, maybe he was taking things for granted?

Those rumblings came from those who don't know the Mikkelsen mentality. Don't know the story, don't know the self-belief and the fighting spirit this fella has; there's substance and steel behind that smile. As a book, he's regularly judged on his cover.

Mikkelsen's been there, seen it, won it, lost it and much, much worse. But he's come out fighting and still smiling.

And good on him. He's good guy. And a bloody great driver.