European Champion Joona Puhakka knows how to take things easy

"I'll keep diving as long as it's still fun"

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By Leena Lavonius in Madrid
     
      Finnish boys and girls, now's your chance to satisfy the #1 wish of new springboard diving European Champion Joona Puhakka: start practising your dives.
      You can kick things off with a forward tuck, legs straight, head facing your knees before you straighten the body on entry.
      "But all the same, I would strongly recommend that you try this one in the swimming-pool and not at home off the edge of the sofa", advises Puhakka.
      On his forehead Puhakka bears a fresh scratch and bruise to underline the warning: a double somersault with twist onto the water-bed fell a trifle short.
      "And then after your first effort it is time to go along to enrol in a diving club."
     
Well, yes, but then it's also years and years of gruelling hard work, awkward training times when the pool is closed to the public, painstaking polishing of your technique, and a dash of luck on the top, and you just might find yourself as a real Olympic medal hopeful, just as Puhakka is for the upcoming Athens games in August.
      Finland's first-ever winner of a major international title in this sport is hopeful that his success will inspire other younger types to take up diving, since he admits that: "Sooner or later I’ll get too old for this game, even if I'm not cut out to be a grown-up". Not quite yet - Puhakka will turn 22 in June.
     
Places and times to train in Finland are few and far between, and the same shortage goes for top-class Finnish divers.
      Kerava-born Puhakka started out as a swimmer. He changed over to the diving platform when this fun sport started to become more interesting than doing lengths of the pool. Puhakka is a product of the Vantaa Swimming Club, as are the two other diving members of the Finnish team who took part in Madrid, Jukka Piekkanen (3-metre springboard) and Ville Vahtola (1-metre springboard).
      Diving has in fact been enjoying something of a boom in Finland before Puhakka's Madrid achievements last week, when he secured a silver medal in the 3-metre springboard event to go with his comfortable win on the 1-metre board.
      Jukka Piekkanen got the country onto the medals rostrum for the first time in 1999, when he took a bronze on the 3-metre board at the European Championships in Istanbul. Puhakka got another European bronze in Helsinki the following year, on the 1-metre board, and he then went one better to take the bronze medal at the World Championships in Barcelona last year, again on the 1-metre board.
     
By any standards, Puhakka's gold medal performance in Madrid was a tour de force. His score of 430.86 points for the six dives in the final is an unofficial European record, and he blew away the rest of the field, leaving the silver and bronze medallists around 40 points in his wake.
      "I went to the Madrid games with two things in mind: getting the European gold and breaking 400 points in competition for the first time. Getting past the big 4-double-0 on the one-metre board puts you in the hard-men club, you know", laughs Puhakka.
      The aim was also to give his coach Mark Bradshaw a suitable birthday gift, and this clearly was achieved. Bradshaw - who was himself a world-class diver and finished fifth on the 3-metre board at the Seoul Olympics in 1988 - coaches Puhakka as part of the Sun Devils team at Arizona State University, where Joona is studying marketing for a business major.
      "In diving, the coach is practically everything. With Mark, all the non-essential stuff has been pared away, we've done an enormous amount of work, and we've concentrated the entire time on the things that really matter. It shows up now in confidence on the board and in demanding dives."
      In competition, the divers perform six pre-selected dives, with the points coming from the execution and the degree of difficulty involved. Easy dives, even well executed, do not secure the points needed to win at this level.
     
On the one-metre board, Puhakka did the same sequence of dives as he had at the Barcelona World Championships. During the final he was never placed lower than third on any of his six efforts, and it was his sheer consistency as much as anything that saw off the opposition. On the 3-metre board programme, there were two new dives this year.
      "I'm still prone to a few mistakes on the 3-metre, but we'll get them sorted before Athens", says Puhakka.
      "Strength and good lines...", he replies to the question of what makes him such a good diver. Strength is a must, in order to be able to spring high off the board. At nearly 180 cm (5' 11"), Puhakka is large for a diver, and his dives look impressive.
      "...Oh, yes, and a good tan helps", he adds with a impish grin.
      Mark Bradshaw comments that Puhakka's best feature is his ability to relax. "He's always his own self. Getting over-excited about things is a sure recipe for disaster. And it's always fun being around Joona."
     
This is not hard to understand, as Puhakka seems blessed with a particularly sunny disposition.
      "I'll keep diving as long as it's still fun. We'll see what happens in Athens, since this discipline is very, very even these days. Any one of six or seven divers could win it. I'm sure it'll be a great competition, and that's the important thing."
      I wonder, can you say about a springboard diver that "he has his feet firmly on the ground"?
      This one does.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 14.5.2004


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Joona Puhakka emphatically wins European Championship title on one-metre springboard (13.5.2004)

Links:
  Joona Puhakka, Arizona State University Diving Team
  Mark Bradshaw, Arizona State University Diving Coach

LEENA LAVONIUS / Helsingin Sanomat
leena.lavonius@gmail.com