Readers rate Paavo Nurmi's sporting achievements above all others

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By Arno Seiro
     
      Helsingin Sanomat readers had from Midsummer to the end of July to express their own opinions on what was the most significant Finnish sporting achievement of all time.
      With the results added up, long-distance runners enjoyed a comprehensive 1-2 victory, as Paavo Nurmi's nine Olympic gold medals between 1920 and 1928 put him firmly on top, and he was followed home by another Olympic track great, Lasse Virén.
      Virén's "double double" of gold at 5,000 and 10,000 metres at the Munich and Montreal Olympics made him an equally emphatic runner-up.
     
Nurmi and Virén were well clear of the field, and following these two at a respecful distance was footballer Jari Litmanen, whose European Champions League winner's medal in an Ajax Amsterdam shirt in 1995 brought him a podium place.
      Ari Paunonen, editor-in-chief of the distance runners' magazine Juoksija, was not overly surprised by the results, even though the days of Finnish runners' almost unseemly domination of the track are long gone.
      "There was admittedly a nagging fear that some of the more modern disciplines might have overtaken Nurmi's achievements in the public mind. But Nurmi is a phenomenon in his own right. The man is an icon. Let's face it, if he hadn't won, we might just as easily forget the national anthem and Jean Sibelius and Aleksis Kivi, and all that", says Paunonen.
     
People in Finland are in complete agreement that Paavo Nurmi was an athlete of quite unique prowess, but at the same time many perceive him to have been one of those grim, solitary, retiring types, happy only pounding the track with a stop-watch in his hand. It was also said that he was so taciturn and retiring that he only agreed to a radio interview on the occasion of his 70th birthday in 1967 when he heard that the interviewer would be his friend and fellow athlete Urho Kekkonen. Kekkonen just happened to be President of Finland at the time.
      There is a good deal of myth in all this talk of a dour, compulsive Nurmi. In the 1980s, Tapio Pekola, the founding editor of Juoksija, had intended to write a book about the great man, and he has observations of Nurmi's character from contemporaries over a long period of time. Pekola says the prevailing public view is not a very accurate one.
     
"Nurmi was actually an extremely social fellow among his own sort - other runners and the like. But he did have a distinct allergy towards snobs and ‘the better sort of people'", says Pekola.
      "There was one occasion when he went to train at a manège, an indoor riding academy in Helsinki. Because the snooty equestrian types turned their noses up at him, Nurmi never went back there. He had his own pride, too", notes Pekola.
     
Around New Year in 1967, Pekola heard a striking story about Nurmi. Pekola had been out for a run (in a blizzard) with the then top Finnish distance-runner Mikko Ala-Leppilampi, in the Helsinki suburb of Vuosaari.
      "We were running, and then Mikko suddenly stopped in his tracks and pointed to a place where - on one of his earlier training sessions - a car had pulled up and a man got out of the driver's side. Paavo Nurmi had stopped to chat and there and then he started discussing distance running with Mikko, and he had even been a bit critical of Mikko's training programme", recalls Pekola.
      Ari Paunonen remembers hearing of another incident involving Nurmi dating from the 1960s. Kari Sinkkonen, who was then one of Finland's best-known long-distance coaches, was just leaving a restaurant when a familiar face appeared in front of him in the foyer.
      "Nurmi just sat him down and discussed running with him for a good long time", says Paunonen, and he rubbishes the idea that Nurmi was this curmudgeonly old man who only kept his own company.
     
So the story goes, Nurmi was also an extremely good dancer, and not shy of putting his talent to good use. "He was often seen in the company of the ladies in dancing restaurants", says Paunonen. Pekola nods and confirms sightings of Nurmi in action on the dance-floor.
     
In the 1980s, Pekola had access to letters written by Paavo Nurmi that he used to get inside the runner's head. And the correspondence also offered a novel means of determining what Nurmi the man was like.
      "I took one of the letters to a well-known American handwriting expert. And after what I heard from him, I almost became a believer in the whole graphology thing", offers Pekola.
      The American expert had no idea whose letter he was analysing, and he did not understand a single word of Finnish, either.
      "But he described the writer as a very intelligent man, who possibly manipulated others. The handwriting had a strong drive and exuded a huge physical presence and capacity. The results were astonishingly similar to the ways in which Nurmi has been described by those who knew him well", says Pekola.
     
Tapio Pekola wholeheartedly agrees with Ari Paunonen that the right man won.
      "Jari Litmanen is the only other candidate who comes close and who could be compared with Nurmi. His career with Ajax was exceptional."
      Since the heyday of Nurmi or Hannes Kolehmainen, or even Lasse Virén in the 1970s, Finnish distance running has undergone a powerful sea-change. These days it is in a strange position. At the top level, we are light-years away from the glory days of yore, but for instance in terms of the number of Finns who have run a marathon, things are looking up.
      Last year alone, some 12,000 Finns managed this feat in mass events.
      "The rise in the standard of living has taken athletes from the distance events and pointed them in other directions, but at the same time it has brought countless new people to running as a pastime and a way of keeping in shape", says Paunonen.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 8.8.2007

More on this subject:
 The Top Ten Finnish Sporting Achievements
 COMMENT: A new kind of sporting culture in the wake of Paavo the Great

Links:
  Paavo Nurmi (Wikipedia)
  Sports Museum of Finland: Paavo Nurmi 100 years
  Lasse Virén (Wikipedia)
  Jari Litmanen (Wikipedia)

ARNO SEIRO / Helsingin Sanomat