Coping with the decline and fall of a sporting superpower

Young Finland's prowess on the track helped in shaping the national identity, but for today's armchair sports fans that success is more of a burden

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By Matti Rämö
     
      There is no denying it: the numbers are pretty impressive.
      Between 1912 and 1936, Finnish athletes of one kind or another collected a phenomenal 142 medals at Summer Olympics - fifty of them gold medals.
      In the period between the two World Wars, the only country to better Finland’s record in track and field events at the Olympics was the United States.
      When you think about it, a little nation could get puffed up about lesser feats.
     
Few ever wanted to spoil the party by muttering that the Finnish teams were not decimated by the First World War, which saw the death on the battlefields of an entire generation of sporting youth around the world.
      Few were eager to admit, either, that the Soviet Union, Germany (1920 & 1924), and Austria (1920) among others had not taken part in some or all of these games.
      Equally, it was not done to point out that a very sizeable part of Finland’s Olympic success in those decades rested on the shoulders of two prodigious runners in Hannes Kolehmainen and Paavo Nurmi, who took 13 gold medals between them.
     
The Olympic triumphs gave birth to the myth of Finland as a mini sporting superpower.
      Even though the last time anyone actually dared boast about superpower status was during the presidency of Kyösti Kallio (1937-1940), the idea of the Finns as “a sporting nation” still lives on.
      Olympic success is accorded greater respect in Finland than in many other countries.
      For a long time the successes of sportsmen and women in individual events were lauded even at the expense of team sports”, says Jouko Kokkonen, a researcher at the Finnish Society of Sport Sciences.
      Kokkonen’s recent Jyväskylä University doctoral thesis A Competing Nation examines sports as a channel and source of nationalism in this country in the first half of the 20th century.
     
For the bourgeoisie setting about constructing an identity for the young independent republic of Finland, Olympic medals were an invaluable tool.
      “Sporting prowess was interpreted as evidence that Finland was capable of performing as a bastion of the West on the frontier with the East. It was also felt that sporting success could not come alone, without a widespread grasp of culture and cultivation”, adds Kokkonen, highlighting the belief that by running faster than others we had to be as smart or smarter than them.
      Sport was also seen as the glue that would reconnect a nation ripped apart by the Civil War.
      To the victorious Whites, the medals were a signal that the core of the nation was healthy.
      In the eyes of the bourgeoisie, the sports field was also an arena in which the hoi polloi could usefully channel their primal woodsman energy - that unpredictable and powerful sisu that could turn a tight contest into victory, but which was potentially hugely destructive if applied the wrong way.
     
The working class looked on at the elite’s sporting foibles with some scepticism, but they, too, felt satisfaction at the rain of medals coming down.
      “Many of the sporting heroes were from working-class backgrounds. Hence those who did not share the bourgeois vision of a blue-and-white Finland could still take the success to their own hearts.”
     
If those early Olympic Games had been an utter disaster for the Finns, the building-blocks for the national identity would have been sought elsewhere than from the stadiums.
      At the same time, the lives of many generations of Finnish armchair sports fans would have been rather easier.
      The idea of Finland as “a little giant” of sport that was once collectively taken on board has had to be surrendered bit by bit.
      When we had once given the invincible Yankees a run for their money, to finish only 6th* in the medals table at the Helsinki Olympics of 1952 felt like a flop.
      The sort of Summer Olympics we experience today, in which Finns pick up a few medals here and there, well, they would have thrown the sports fanatics of the 1920s into a grave identity crisis.
     
As the gilt has worn off the success, so the role of sport as a builder of national identity has become diluted.
      The myth of the sporting nation has been updated years ago, and it now is taken to mean a general interest in sport rather than all-conquering prowess.
      And yet sport still brings out the state of the national identity, in good and in bad.
      “The hype that surrounded the winning of the Ice Hockey World Championships [in 1995] went completely overboard with its talk of vanquishing the recession and the fighter escort that was given to the plane carrying the returning heroes. It took years before people began to see the comic side of the over-interpretation that was going on”, says Kokkonen.
     
No less bombastic in its own way has been the wailing and gnashing of teeth that has gone on for years about the doping scandal in cross-country skiing and the busts at the Lahti Nordic World Championships of 2001.
      “The fuss has had people asking where the old Finnish sisu has disappeared to and what has happened to the much-vaunted Finnish sense of honesty. Because cross-country skiing takes place against a backdrop of the National Romantic landscape, it is as if the dirtying of the discipline has also tarnished the myths of pure and unsullied Finnish nature.”
     
The attitudes towards the shame of the skiing fraternity divide the generations.
      Those armchair fans brought up on the English Premiership and the NHL regard sport as multinational entertainment, and not as a national matter of life or death.
      To many young people, cross-country skiing is just a rather old-fashioned marginal sport - why should one let it shake or shape the national identity one way or another?
      “For the older baby-boomer generation brought up on the Munich and Montreal victories of Lasse Viren and on their parents’ heroic yarnsa of Nurmi running against the clock, sporting success means more than to their children", says Kokkonen.
      "These same older Finns have also grown accustomed to seeing skiing as a very Finnish sport, and hence the doping furore hits their sense of national identity where it hurts.”
     
The big interpretations that are made ultimately say a good deal more about the Finns as a sporting nation than any amount of medals tables.
      “Sport is in essence a rather content-free form of action. Its strength lies in the meanings attributed to the performance”, argues Kokkonen.
     
     
*Note: Or 8th, depending how one counts it. In any event, Finland collected just one track and field medal, a bronze in the men's javelin.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 26.10.2008
     


Links:
  Jouko Kokkonen: A competing nation. Sports as channel and source of nationalism in Finland 1900–1952 (abstract in English)
  Finland at the Olympics (Wikipedia)

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