His triumphant march began with a misunderstanding.
Before the 2010 Olympics, the sports outfitter had sent the wrong clothing to Team Ulsrud, which also included Torger Nergård, Christoffer Svae and Håvard Vad Petterson.
The athletes looked for and found a replacement: patterned golf pants in the Norwegian colors of red, white and blue.
After internal discussions, they competed and were successful: Ulrud and Co. won Olympic silver in Vancouver - and the curling alley was their catwalk from then on.
Achim Dreis
sports editor.
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Thomas Ulsrud, also optically a guy who would have passed as a model for upscale men's fashion, consistently followed suit, as he had learned in his middle-class job as a manager.
At every tournament, his team always had new, mostly wildly patterned trousers in their luggage, the basic colors of which always remained red, white and blue.
From then on, the "Norwegians with the colorful trousers" were a household name in the world of sports.
And they could afford to appear as fashionable clowns on the ice, because their sporting success was right: "Team Ulsrud" became world champion in 2014, twice European champion in 2010 and 2011 and won 13 other international medals between 2002 and 2016.
Thomas Ulsrud was a "role model, gentleman and friend", as his long-time companion, the German national coach Uli Kapp, praised him on Facebook.
After the 2018 Olympics, Ulsrud retired from competitive sport.
He was diagnosed with cancer in December 2020, which he did not make public.
On Tuesday, the married father of a son died of the disease at the age of 50.