Oh Nooooooo!!! What is Finland's worst sporting memory?
Own-goal shame at the Olympic Stadium, doping scandals, match-fixing, or those damned Swedes again?
By Ari Pusa
It is a rainy Saturday night in October 1997.
A crowd of more than 30,000 in the Olympic Stadium are drenched but delighted, and waiting for the final whistle.
We are already into injury time. Finland are 1-0 up against Hungary through a goal from Antti Sumiala. Only a couple of minutes, and Finland will have qualified for a UEFA play-off place for the 1998 World Cup finals in France.
At last.
The dream of actual qualification for a major tournament seems to be just seconds and two play-off ties away.
Tantalisingly close.
Hungary force a corner on the left. The ball is whipped across and bobbles and bounces dangerously from one Finnish player to another like some slow-motion pinball game.
But no worries. Defender Sami Mahlio clears off the line and attempts to boot the ball upfield.
What? Oh God, tell me it’s not true!
The ball strikes goalkeeper
Teuvo Moilanen on the part of his body normally used for sitting, and rolls soggily back into the goal.
There is a stunned silence in the stands. Finland’s dream is shattered once again. Added time was too much time.
Does that awful Hungary match* have what it takes to be the all-time bitterest Finnish sporting memory?
Or are there other worthier, even grimmer candidates?
Helsingin Sanomat’s sports section is arranging a public vote on the subject.
Readers can vote for the most abject sporting moment in Finnish history at the Finnish-language hs.fi online portal. The polls are open until the end of January.
In order to make things a little easier, we have collected nine sporting memories guaranteed to raise the eyebrows and lower the spirits.
Of course you can also write in your own unlisted “favourite disastrous sporting moment”.
Sports journalist Timo Järviö reported on the nerve-jangling Finland-Hungary game in the following day’s paper (Helsingin Sanomat 12.10.1997):
“The Hungarian equaliser brought a sudden sense of the surreal to the atmosphere in the Stadium, as the joy of 31,000 fans evaporated in an instant into the deepest despair. Did it have to end like this?”
“Frustrated fans threw a few drinks cans onto the pitch. The bitterness of the moment was amplified by the fact that for the ninety minutes Finland had dominated proceedings and had actually played themselves into a winning position.”
Such scenes of raw anger among the departing fans have seldom been witnessed in and around the Olympic Stadium.
There was a fevered tension in the air.
The fury was taken out on countless innocent rubbish bins, kicked senseless as people trudged home.
But if football is not something to get your juices flowing, then doping is always good for a discussion.
The events that occurred at the Lahti Nordic Skiing World Championships in 2001 are still fresh in the public memory. Even now, one still occasionally hears someone asking where you were when the news broke about the top Finnish skiers and the "HemoHes" doping scandal.
Probably the most tragi-comical-farcical detail of the entire sordid episode was that medical bag of tricks inadvertently left at a Helsinki filling station, which HS reported on 26.2.2001:
“Finland’s doping scandal took a new turn on Sunday. It transpired that the doctor’s bag mislaid by the Finnish Ski Association contained six used infusion bags of Haes-Steril, a hydroxyethyl starch plasma volume expander very similar to the one found in the positive doping sample given by skier Jari Isometsä on February 15th.”
The bag was found accidentally at a gas station in the capital, right next to the pumps, just under a week before the beginning of the World Championships.
On that same Saturday, February 10th, the members of the Finnish cross-country skiing team had returned home from Estonia after taking part in FIS World Cup events.
The bag was handed in to police on the 20th, a couple of days after Isometsä had been exposed.
The then Chairman of the Finnish Ski Association Paavo M. Petäjä was shocked when he heard late on the Sunday night (25th February) of the secrets of the missing bag.
“Oh Jesus...”, Petäjä commented to Helsingin Sanomat.
Shortly after this, the wheels of the FSA wagon fell off completely, and Isometsä’s sad example was followed by first one and then by four more Finnish skiers, including an Olympic champion from 1998 (Mika Myllylä) and the grand old man of the sport Harri Kirvesniemi.
The ripples of shame spread far and wide, not least as corporate sponsors rushed to distance themselves from the tarnished sport.
Martti Vainio’s doping case at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 was another discussion topic with a long shelf-life. Matters were only comprehensively cleared up years later, when Vainio himself also fessed up.
HS journalist Juhan Syvänen described the breaking scandal in the paper on 13.8.1984:
“Vainio did not confess his guilt, even though he is a very enlightened athlete. A large dose of anabolic steroids does not find its way into an athlete’s body in pill or intravenous form without his or her knowledge. Vainio says he is bewildered by the outcome and I can guess why. The breakdown of the steroids by the body was slower than anticipated. By the time the Los Angeles games came around, the tests should not have flagged up red. Martti Vainio will be returning from LA on Tuesday in very low spirits.”
The whole Vainio farrago was further complicated by the fact that the distance runner had already failed a Finnish Sports Association internal test some months previously, and it had been hushed up.
He received a two-year ban, and though he returned to the track and even took part in the 10,000 metres at the 1987 World Championships in Rome. Mind you, that race was nothing to write home about: the marshals blundered and told Vainio he'd finished when he still actually had one lap to run, and he was disqualified.
Doping has long roots in Finland. It goes back even to the 1970s, though on this occasion the sport was ice hockey, and the drug of choice was ephedrine.
Stig Wetzell was a member of the Finnish national team at the 1974 Ice Hockey World Championships, hosted by the Finns. Wetzell was a goaltender, a long-serving member of the HIFK Helsinki league team, but in 1974 he (along with the Swedish center Ulf Nilsson) tested positive for the banned substance ephedrine.
Both were suspended from the tournament.
Finland had just beaten Czechoslovakia 5-2 when the doping scandal broke, and the tournament organisers awarded the match to the Czechs 5-0.
As a result, the Finns lost out on what would have been a certain first-ever medal at the World Championships.
Wetzell has doggedly insisted he had no idea how the substance came to be in his body. It seems probable that the bust was the result of actions by the Finnish team doctors, but no hard and fast answers have ever been forthcoming.
In any event the case shocked the Finnish hosts to the core and left a permanent stamp on Wetzell, who played on with HIFK until 1983.
Other ice hockey events, sans doping, are also likely to figure high on the public’s bitterness scale.
Those apparently inevitable defeats to Sweden, for instance.
Probably the one that still causes most fans’ hearts to go into arrhythmia was from 2003, at another World Championships played at home.
In the quarter-finals, in front of a packed house in the new Helsinki Arena, the Finns were butchering Sweden.
They led 5-1 halfway through the second period and the Swedes were dead and buried, but somehow Team Finland conspired to lose the match 6-5.
Sports journalist Kaarlo Sundell commented on the match in the Helsingin Sanomat of 8.5.2003:
“The medals chase of the Finnish Lions at the World Championships came to an abrupt halt. Hand on heart, deep down we knew this sort of thing was supposed to happen. All the same, the way that the Swedes pulled it off this time beggars all belief. Even a four-goal lead wasn’t enough for the Finns!”
Finnish-rules baseball does not have the hazards of Finland being beaten by the Swedes, but it gets onto the list.
Although one has to ask whether the 1998 match-fixing scandal was really the most bitter sporting memory, at least for those not directly involved with the sport.
The whole thing began to unravel following a Helsingin Sanomat headline on August 14th, 1998: "Veikkaus suspects match-fixing in Finnish Men’s SuperLeague".
The investigation of the case, involving the outcome of some late-season “dead” matches, took a long time.
The sport lost its credibility for years, and the players and coaching staff lost their reputations.
Sponsors and broadcasters shied away from the popular summer game.
Match-fixing was in the air again in July 2005, when the Vantaa-based football club AC Allianssi were given an 8-0 thrashing by FC Haka of Valkeakoski under rather suspicious circumstances and amid rumours of heavy betting on the game on Far East gaming markets, both legal and illegal.
The newly-appointed coach’s selections and the scoreline prompted doubts that the result had been arranged in advance, and the scent led back to a Belgian-Chinese cartel that had earlier invested in and taken control of the Vantaa club.
The upshot of it all was that Allianssi’s matches were rapidly pulled from betting coupons.
The club lost its league licence and filed for bankruptcy in the following year, and the Chinese businessman owner Ye Zheyun vanished as mysteriously as he had appeared in the first place.
An international arrest warrant has since been issued for him.
Then there are two Finnish sporting legends who may warrant inclusion in the list of awful moments.
Cross-country skier Juha Mieto (now a Member of Parliament) missed out on the gold medal to Thomas Wassberg of Sweden in the 15km race at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics.
Whilst there is nothing intrinsically awful about taking a silver medal, it was the nature of the defeat that brought bitter tears. Mieto finished in a time of 41:57.64. Wassberg, who had started some minutes later, stopped the electronic timer at 41:57.63, to win by the smallest conceivable margin of one hundredth of a second.
This was the last major championships where 1/100ths of a second were used in the sport, and the International Ski Federation thereafter rounded all times to the nearest tenth of a second.
Mieto himself recalled the events of 27 years earlier in an Ilta-Sanomat interview in February of last year:
“I remember it all like it was yesterday. At first the defeat made me so furious. I took it almost as a personal slight, as malice. Now, I’m no longer disappointed about it.”
Finns have a long sporting tradition of being bitter towards the Swedes, with the roots going back, at least in some measure, to the early 1930s.
That was the time when our dear neighbours were instrumental in blowing the whistle on the lavish travel expenses paid to Paavo Nurmi for attending athletics meetings abroad, claiming that he was de facto a professional.
This meant Nurmi was barred from competing at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, where he had hoped to crown his outstanding distance-running career with victory in the marathon and a tenth Olympic gold.
The Finns were so enraged at what was seen as Swedish jealousy and subterfuge that they boycotted the annual Finland-Sweden athletics meet until 1939.
* NOTE: In all fairness, the horror of it was tempered later to some extent by the fact that Hungary - who went on to the play-offs by virtue of that 1-1 draw - ended up being put to the sword by Yugoslavia. The Yugoslavs crushed them 12-1 on aggregate over two legs and went on to reach the last 16 in France, losing eventually to Holland 2-1. Finland might have suffered a similar fate to the Hungarians if that own goal had not gone in...
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 19.1.2008
You can vote for your own candidate on the Helsingin Sanomat web portal at the link given below the accompanying article. The text is in Finnish, but the accompanying article lists the initial selections in numerical order in English, and you can always enter your own choice at No.10.
More on this subject:
 Vote for your own bitterest Finnish sporting memory
ARI PUSA / Helsingin Sanomat
ari.pusa@sanoma.fi
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Oh Nooooooo!!! What is Finland's worst sporting memory?
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