Javelin world champion Tero Pitkämäki takes Sports Personality of the Year trophy

F1 Drivers' Championship earns only 3rd place for Kimi Räikkönen

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Tuesday evening saw the award by sports journalists of Finland’s Sports Personality of the Year title, and a trio of world champions occupied the podium places.
      Traditional sports won out - pretty much as expected - over “newer” events in the Finnish sporting canon, and the top honour went to javelin world champion Tero Pitkämäki, who took gold in Osaka and has already been crowned as European Athlete of the Year by the EAA.
     
Pitkämäki received 4,725 votes from the jury of 541 sports journalists, and he held off triple cross-country skiing world champion Virpi Kuitunen by 636 votes. Kuitunen was naturally selected as the Female Athlete of the Year by a crushing margin.
      Tero Pitkämäki also took the greatest number of 1st-place votes: 203 or just over 37% of the voting journalists regarded him as the best Finnish sporting individual of the year, regardless of discipline.
     
Kimi Räikkönen’s surprise last-ditch win in the Formula One Drivers’ Championship gave him a total of 149 1st-place votes, as against 118 for Kuitunen, but he nevertheless had to be content with third place with 4,022 votes overall.
      In earlier times, Mika Häkkinen (1998) and Keke Rosberg (1982) fared rather better: both of them won the title in the year they were crowned F1 World Champion, although Häkkinen’s second Formula One title in 1999 was not enough to repeat the feat.
     
Whilst there were some noises off that Räikkönen’s achievement did not merit a higher placing, few would have bet serious money against Pitkämäki after he brought home Finland’s only medal from the IAAF World Championships in Japan.
      The javelin has long been a favourite track and field discipline among the Finns, in fact almost a religion.
      It is an event with a rich tradition of success, and Finns also retain a soft spot for athletics in general, even long after the country’s “Flying Finn” reputation has become a dim and distant memory.
      Virpi Kuitunen, too, was bound to be a contender. Cross-country skiing is still very much in the blood hereabouts, especially in rural areas, where new-fangled sports like tennis or golf or motor racing are seen as somewhat “unFinnish”.
      Kuitunen dominated among the women at the Nordic Skiing World Championships in Sapporo, and won three golds and a bronze medal.
     
In all fairness to Tero Pitkämäki, he hardly put a foot wrong all season, and was consistently a few metres ahead of all his colleagues, including his close friend and rival the 2004 Olympic gold medallist Andreas Thorkildsen of Norway.
      Just about the only defeat he suffered in 2007 coincided with a moment of stark horror for any athlete: during the IAAF Golden League meeting in Rome in July, one of Pitkämäki’s throws veered too far left and hit French long jumper Salim Sdiri in the side of the back. Sdiri was rushed to hospital with serious but not life-threatening injuries, and Pitkämäki himself was fortunate to escape from the incident without too much mental trauma.
      The way in which the 25-year-old rose to the occasion in September on the final day of the games in Osaka - with all the Finnish hopes riding on his shoulders and as the hot ante-post favourite in an event where tiny errors of technique can be catastrophic - was very much to his credit.
     
He brushed aside Thorkilden’s challenge by immediately matching and surpassing a big throw by the Norwegian on his third attempt, and he then sealed matters with a massive final heave of over 90 metres when the competition was already done and dusted.
      Ten other victories during the year, the second-longest throw of the season, and five out of the ten longest throws by anyone only served to underline his dominance of the event.
      Provided that he stays healthy, Pitkämäki is already in the frame as one of Finland’s few serious track and field medal hopes at the Beijing Olympics.
      Athens in 2004 was a complete washout for the Finnish track and field team, and hence Pitkämäki can probably feel the pressure mounting already.
     
So the title of Sports Personality of the Year went to the athletics fraternity for the second year in succession, after 3,000 metres steeplechaser Jukka Keskisalo cruised home in 2006.
      We have to go back 11 years to the last javelin winner, however: an Olympic gold in the women’s event was enough to win it for Heli Rantanen in 1996.
     
The top three in 2007 were relatively evenly matched in the end, and enjoyed a comfortable advantage over the rest of the field, led home by Nordic Combined world champion Hannu Manninen with 2,964 votes.
      Fifth place went to Teemu Selänne, winner of the NHL’s coveted Stanley Cup with Anaheim Ducks. Selänne outscored Manninen in 1st-place votes by 37 to 10, but could amass only 2,611 votes all told.
      The other names in the Top 10 were speed skating world championships silver medallist and the current world record holder over 1,000 metres Pekka Koskela (6th), Heli Jukkola and Minna Kauppi, who spectacularly dead-heated for the gold medal in the long distance event at this year’s orienteering world championships (7th and 9th respectively), the two-time World Rally Championship winner Marcus Grönholm, who retired at the end of this season (8th), and the Bolton Wanderers and Finland goalkeeper Jussi Jääskeläinen (10th).
     
Jääskeläinen, who kept seven clean sheets during Finland’s Euro 2008 campaign, was also recently voted Footballer of the Year, and he further took top honours in a poll among readers of Helsingin Sanomat’s online edition, where football fans had clearly mobilised themselves in large numbers and focused their vote.
      Jääskeläinen also outgunned his Finland teammate Sami Hyypiä of Liverpool, who was behind him in 11th place, ATP tennis pro Jarkko Nieminen (12th), and a new face in Mikko Ilonen (13th), whose claim to fame in 2007 was a brace of wins on the European Tour, the first ever by a Finnish male golfer.
     
The public were also invited to vote alongside the journalists.
      They came up with a different order from the professionals, putting Virpi Kuitunen at the top of the pile with 24.7% of the votes, ahead of Kimi Räikkönen with 18.3% and Tero Pitkämäki with 14.3%.
     
The Coach of the Year was Mauro Berruto, who guided the Finnish men’s volleyball team to an unexpected but richly deserved 4th place in the European Championships in Moscow.
      The volleyball players themselves collected the Team of 2007 Award.
      Victory in both cases was overwhelming, though some might have speculated on what the outcome in these two categories would have been if Finland's footballers had scored a late winner against Portugal in November.
      The Disabled Athlete of the Year title went to wheelchair sprinter Leo-Pekka Tähti, a winner already in 2004.
     
The Sports Personality event was televised live by the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE, but in an unfortunate glitch, the results were made public on the company’s website two or three hours before the show went out.
      It is perfectly normal that the results are made available to the media just before the actual event, but under normal circumstances the journalists keep the information to themselves.
      This time someone’s fingers found the wrong key on the keyboard, and the details escaped into the ether ahead of schedule.

More on this subject:
 COMMENT: Worldwide fame provides no assistance

Previously in HS International Edition:
  Pitkämäki rises to the occasion and takes gold in Osaka (3.9.2007)
  Finns bring home eight medals from Sapporo (5.3.2007)
  Kimi Räikkönen is the 2007 Formula One World Champion - for now (22.10.2007)
  European Champion Jukka Keskisalo chosen Sports Personality of the Year (21.12.2006)

Links:
  Tero Pitkämäki (Wikipedia)
  Virpi Kuitunen (Wikipedia)
  Kimi Räikkönen (Wikipedia)

Helsingin Sanomat