Seventy years ago today: Taisto Mäki breaks through 30-minute barrier

Runner's career blighted by Second World War

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The reasons why the name of Finnish distance-runner Taisto Mäki (1910-1979) is not as well known as that of his coach and mentor Paavo Nurmi have much more to do with global politics and unfortunate timing than with anything he did on the track.
     
Seven decades ago, for a brief and dazzling period, Mäki was the name in long distance running, and precisely 70 years ago today he became the first man in history to break 30 minutes for the 10,000 metres.
      The world record, which took nearly ten seconds off the record he already held, was set in the Olympic Stadium in Helsinki, and the clock stopped at 29:52.6.
      Mäki simultaneously held the world record for the 5,000 metres (14:08.8) and for the two miles (8:53.2).
     
His time for the 5,000 remained a Finnish record for sixteen years, and perhaps more worryingly, even today it would probably win someone a medal at the national championships - so far have standards fallen from the heyday of Finnish distance running.
      In the course of 1938 and 1939, Mäki set six world records, kicking off the proceedings with a 10,000-metre record run in Tampere where he came within two seconds of the magic half-hour mark.
     
But Taisto Mäki's list of championship titles is a great deal shorter.
      In 1938 he won the European Championships gold medal in the 5,000 metres.
      At the time of his sub-30-minute run, parts of Europe were already at war, and Finland was slipping dangerously in the same direction: the Winter War with the Soviet Union broke out in late November.
      There would be no 1940 Olympics - not in Japan where it had been originally planned, and not in Helsinki, which had stepped up to offer its services.
      By the time the London Olympics came around in 1948, Mäki's window of opportunity had long since gone.
     
During the Winter War, he initially served in Karelia, but was soon taken out of the fighting to go with Paavo Nurmi to the United States to drum up support for the Finnish war effort.
      There he ran a number of exhibition races against U.S. athletes, though with no great success - apparently the combination of serving in uniform on the front and then being regaled at parties by enthusiastic Finnish-American well-wishers was not the best training programme.
     
Taisto Mäki came to prominence relatively late: he won his first Finnish title in the 5,000 metres in 1934, at the age of 23.
      He was known as a dedicated trainer, and would take a 14-kilometre run before going to work at the Alko warehouse in Helsinki's Katajanokka.
      After work, he would run back to his home in Vantaa's Rekola district, a distance of 23 kilometres.
      The City of Vantaa plans to erect a plaque to Taisto Mäki close to the Rekola sports ground in 2010, on the 100th anniversary of his birth.
      He died on May Day in 1979.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  The introduction to this article gives a brief insight into the heyday of Finnish distance running (20.8.2002)

Links:
  Pony Express, an article from Time in 1940
  Taisto Mäki (Wikipedia)

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