A waitress with a VERY sharp eye and a steady hand

Satu Mäkelä-Nummela has been in a whirl since Beijing, but the Olympic gold medallist will be calming down for Christmas and starting in a new profession next year

Satu Mäkelä-Nummela

print this

By Jarmo Färdig in Orimattila
     
      Although winning a gold medal in the trap shooting at the Olympics in Beijing in August did not exactly turn Satu Mäkelä-Nummela’s life inside out, the woman from Orimattila could tell you that the difference between “before” and “after” shows plainly enough in her calendar.
      “Throughout the autumn there have been requests, invitation, exhortations, and comings and goings, but at least it hasn’t got to the point where it gets me stressed out”, observed a cheery Mäkelä-Nummela at her workplace, in the coffee-shop of a busy motorway service station between Helsinki and Lahti.
     
“Besides, don’t you think people are pretty soon going to get tired of seeing my face all over the place? The fuss will go on for a bit, but that win in August demonstrated to me once and for all that the Finns are a sports-mad bunch of people.”
      “My home life hasn’t changed. The interviews and the appearances on television have just added a certain colour to the everyday things”, says the mother of two.
     
Mäkelä-Nummela feels the smell of gunpowder in her nostrils practically throughout the year.
      She shoots in competitions and on the practice range, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of cartridges shattering flying targets.
      “Frankly, around this time of the year, the scent of gingerbread cookies and baked ham beats gunpowder any day. Christmas this year isn’t going to cause me any of the usual panic or stress, either - I’ve been promised a complete clean-up at home for the holidays as a gift”, she smiles.
     
For nearly fifteen years, Mäkelä-Nummela has enjoyed working in the café at the Tuuliharja service area close by the motorway.
      However, in a week or two, there will be a place vacant for the world’s most steady-handed waitress, as the Olympic winner is changing jobs in the New Year.
      “I didn’t go looking for somewhere new to work, but the job proposal rather came to me. I listened to the offer, we discussed it, and then when my prospective employer signed on to the fact that I’ll probably be away from work for three or four months of the year, I thought, hey, why not?”
      Her new position is in a department store in Lahti. Mäkelä-Nummela is switching the cups and plates for selling sporting goods, and the store’s hunting and hiking counter is also handily located, not far from the Olympic champion’s department.
     
Satu says the memories of the decade and a half at the Tuuliharja coffee-shop will live with her for ever.
      One of the most recent and among the most touching came a few months ago.
      She was going about her business in the café when a male customer came up to her, accompanied by his wife.
      “This here lady”, declared the man earnestly to his partner, “is the woman who was the last to reduce me to tears”, and then he introduced Mäkelä-Nummela to his wife.
     
Satu Mäkelä-Nummela has been inundated with invitations to attend all manner of events, some of them with precious little connection to her chosen sport.
      In some cases she has been able to say yes, but there have been times when she has just had to decline.
     
One product of her newfound celebrity in the wake of the Beijing Olympics was that she would have been a dead cert for a place in the fourth series of Tanssii tähtien kanssa ("Dancing with the Stars", the Finnish version of the BBC hit Strictly Come Dancing), but in this instance the schedules were never going to be compatible.
      The TV programme would have been in production at the same time as the members of Finland’s national shooting team are on a training camp abroad.
      “It’s a shame that I can’t take part. I really do love dancing.”
      “My guess that a dance contest like that is not so very different from a shooting competition. You have to prepare for both extremely carefully. After long consideration, I ended up having to turn it down.”
     
On the other hand, she has made time for warm and relaxing trips to talk to kids in local schools, and on a completely different note, there is a date pencilled into her calendar for January when she will don a helmet and strap herself in as a co-driver and navigator on the Orimattila Rally.
      The Olympic winner is already casting her eyes forward to new competitions and training sessions. In the near to middle future there will be a two-week camp in South Africa in February, followed by a week in March in the Canaries.
      “It’s not as though I stare fixedly at the training programme and live day-to-day by it. I’ll carry on with the sport just as long as it feels like fun, and as long as I have the time and energy to devote to it that it requires."
     
Her main objectives for next season will be to do well in the ISSF European and World Championships and the World Cup competitions. Her only previous medal in the sport before Beijing came in the Trap World Championships in Nicosia back in 1995, when she took a bronze, but next year she will be among the favourites on the strength of her cool showing in August.
      She is enjoying a second bite at the elite level of the sport, having returned to the fray full-time only after the birth of her second child in 2002.
      “Next season is really a sort of in-between year, in which everyone is sniffing around for form. The big shakeout for places in London will not come before 2010", says Mäkelä-Nummela in her only reference to the prospect of the 2012 Summer Olympics glinting on the horizon.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 21.12.2008

More on this subject:
 WHO? Satu Mäkelä-Nummela
 Olympic winner Mäkelä-Nummela predictably tops readers' poll on Helsingin Sanomat online site

Previously in HS International Edition:
  Satu Mäkelä-Nummela wins gold in Beijing women´s trap event (11.8.2008)

Links:
  Satu Mäkelä-Nummela on the ISSF pages
  Shooting at the 2008 Summer Olympics -Women´s Trap (Wikipedia)
  Profile (in Finnish) at Finnish Shooting Sport Federation

JARMO FÄRDIG / Helsingin Sanomat
jarmo.fardig@hs.fi