Remembering "The Baron": Jarno Saarinen at the Sports Museum

The Sports Museum at the Olympic Stadium has put together an exhibition of the life of Jarno Saarinen (1945-1973), the only Finn ever to win a motorcycle road racing world championship title.

Jarno Saarinen

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By Ville Heinonen
     
      Who is that crazy guy who keeps coming upside of me in even the most impossible of places? It looks like he's going to drop the bike on every bend.
     
      These words, or ones very like them, belong to the road racing legend Giacomo Agostini, winner of 122 Grands Prix and 15 World Championship titles.
      However, Agostini was certainly not the only member of the RR family at the beginning of the 1970s to be gobsmacked at the riding style and skills of a young "privateer" (someone not riding for a works team) who was rapidly climbing to the top of the motorcycling world.
     
In just a couple of seasons, the man who was causing Agostini to glance nervously over his shoulder had risen to pose a genuine challenge to the Italian's position as the brightest star in the road racing firmament.
      In his very first World Championship season, on a 250cc Yamaha, that man had put together enough points to finish fourth, in spite of the fact that he skipped the last three Grands Prix on the calendar so as to get back and continue his engineering degree studies.
      Probably the greatest sensation was caused in the spring of 1973 when he won the prestigious Daytona 200 in the United States, as the first non-American to do so, and he did not merely win it, but triumphed on a Yamaha TZ350 against a host of much larger bikes.
      That man was Jarno Saarinen, from Turku.
     
Saarinen was a motorcycling pioneer, who died tragically in a massive first-lap crash at Monza in May 1973, at the very point when he was arguably on the verge of taking the entire sport by the scruff of the neck.
      He left in the minds of Finnish sports enthusiasts a particularly pervasive image of a shining youth-idol, and his premature demise only increased his stature. Arguably his death, along with Italy's Renzo Pasolini, was as big a shock to motorcycle racing as the loss of Ayrton Senna was to Formula One two decades later.
     
Now the memories of Jarno "The Baron" Saarinen's short, glittering career are being refreshed by the Finnish Sports Museum, nestled next to the Olympic Stadium in Helsinki.
      Until the end of September, the museum is putting on an exhibition of Saarinen's racing bikes, overalls, and a whole host of trophies and medals.
      The most valuable of the medals is the one he collected for winning the 1972 World Championship in the 250cc class, the first and only Finnish winner. That same year he was also runner-up in the 350cc category, and won a total of seven Grands Prix.
      Saarinen was also on the podium in both the 250cc and 350cc classes in 1971, and at the time of his death in 1973 he had won five GPs out of six in the 250cc and 500cc classes and was leading the riders' tables by a country mile. By now riding for the powerful Yamaha works team, it looked as though he was unstoppable - even by the likes of Agostini himself.
     
Jarno Saarinen also won seven Finnish championship titles, but ultimately his greatest contribution to the sport was not in the number of medals he amassed. Above all, what made the handsome young Finnish man an icon among bike enthusiasts was the radical new riding style he brought to road racing, with a distinctive and influential knee-dragging position that allowed him to drop the bike lower into curves.
      It was a style later perfected by Kenny Roberts of the United States, who won three 500cc world titles in the late 1970s, and one in general use today.
     
"Jarno Saarinen was posthumously inducted into the MotoGP Hall of Fame in July 2009. One the basis of having won just one 250cc World Championship, he would never have made the cut. The primary reason was that he made a very significant contribution to the development of the sport", underlines Kaisa Lahtinen from the Sports Museum.
     
In the recollections from contemporaries in a documentary film also at the show, Jarno Saarinen is described repeatedly in terms such as cheery, extrovert, good with languages, fair, and charismatic.
      On the track, however, he was above all a perfectionist.
      With an engineering training to call on, he tuned his bike himself (something he had to do anyway in his privateer years), made precise notes of all the tracks he rode, and carefully taught himself by heart how to cope with every curve on even the trickiest of circuits.
     
"The Baron's" younger brother Jari Saarinen approves of the museum show, saying it is like the man himself.
      "It's very stylishly laid out and even the texts are just right. Jarno was very fastidious about that sort of thing: everything had to be in its right place", says Saarinen's brother, now 60.
      Kaisa Laitinen is also pleased with the show and the attention it has drawn.
      "It is no coincidence that one can find quite a few motorbikes in our car park these days", she says, in a reference to the visits by biking devotees.
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 30.6.2010
     
     
Jarno Saarinen Exhibition, Sports Museum of Finland (at the north end of the Olympic Stadium), until 26th September 2010. Normal opening hours, Mon-Fri 11:00-17:00 and Sat-Sun 12:00-16:00. Admission for adults EUR 5.00, under-18s free, and groups, students, and pensioners EUR 3.00.
     
     
Please note that the earlier IntEd articles on Saarinen are getting somewhat venerable - all the links given may not be functional any longer. The photographs originally on Henk van Melzen's Dutch site have been transferred elsewhere and are still accessible.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Twenty-eight years on, a road-racing legend gets his road...(23.5.2001)
  1973-2003: Saarinen´s flame still burns (20.5.2003)

Links:
  An excellent collection of photographs, links & fascinating videoclips of Saarinen, formerly on the site of dedicated fan Henk van Melzen
  Jarno Saarinen (Wikipedia)
  Sports Museum of Finland

Helsingin Sanomat