One more season: Finnish sports icons stubbornly hang on in there
Teemu Selänne
|
Saku Koivu
|
Jere Lehtinen
|
Vile Peltonen
|
Jari Litmanen
|
Hanno Möttölä
|
Atik Ismail
|
Janne Ojanen
|
Antti Niemi
|
Amin Asikainen
|
Hannu Manninen
|
Janne Ahonen
|
Matti Nykänen
|
Mika Myllylä
|
Esa Tikkanen
|
By Tommi Nieminen
When the veteran Tappara and Finland ice hockey center Janne Ojanen suits up in the locker-room this season, he is likely to be surrounded by a good many players who were not even born when he scored his first international goal at adult level, against the Soviet Union in March 1987.
One wonders a little at the pre-match banter between a bunch of 20-somethings and a man who will be 42 in April and whose oldest child is already well into her teens.
Does he ever think he might be too old for all this?
"Of course it's crossed my mind, yes. But to my surprise I've noticed that I can cope pretty well with the rigours of three games in four days. If push comes to shove and I can't hack it, then I'll quit."
It is not as if Ojanen will be falling out of hockey into thin air: he has a small firm producing business gifts in partnership with a friend.
He first considered hanging up his skates three or four years ago.
At the end of the 2008-2009 campaign it was "really touch and go", especially after a nagging thigh injury kept him out for the end of the season, but his wife Sanna, his three kids, and the Tampere Tappara fans talked him round.
Besides, he had something to play for: at the start of the new season Ojanen was just one point shy of the all-time record for goals and assists in the SM-Liiga, held by Arto Javanainen for the previous sixteen years.
"That was one reason. It would have left a bit of a bad taste in the mouth to quit just then."
After getting himself match-fit after a long layoff, he made his return to the ice in early November and after a nerve-jangling wait of a few "dry" games he finally scored the point that took him past Javanainen on November 28th.
Had he retired at the end of the previous season Ojanen says he would also have missed out on the unique rush that comes with seeing the puck hit the back of the opponents' net.
And on life in the Tappara locker-room, too, where apparently he still keeps his end up admirably well in the trash-talking among colleagues.
But now that the record is secure (at the time of writing Ojanen is nursing another thigh injury and teetering on the brink of yet another milestone with 799 points), is that it? Finito?
"Well, one more Finnish Championship title [he has three, all with Tappara] would be great to experience. But I really don't feel like saying anything either way about stopping", says Ojanen.
"I'll play this season through to the end and see how it feels. In principle it's possible I'll go on for another round."
There are plenty of others like Janne Ojanen: husbands and fathers nudging forty and still at the top of their sporting trade.
They drag themselves every day to the rink, climb up the ski-jumping tower, clamber into the boxing ring, onto the football pitch, or out onto the ski-tracks.
Morning training. A gritty workout with the weights in the gym. Speed work. Getting on the bus for away matches. Trips to training camps in the company of young lads in their twenties giving exaggerated organ recitals about their latest conquests.
What drives these old stagers to do it?
Football goalkeeper Antti Niemi is a father of two, and he will turn 38 in May.
He hung up his gloves in September 2008 after a bad wrist injury.
At the time he was playing for Fulham in the English Premiership after successful spells with Southampton and Hearts (and rumours that clubs of the stature of Arsenal and Manchester United were interested in securing his services), and after 67 caps as Finland's first-choice keeper before he withdrew from full international duties in 2005.
Then in August of last year Niemi announced he was returning to the game, and he was signed by Portsmouth on a one-year contract as backup to David James and to work with the club's goalkeeping coaches.
The Anaheim Ducks left wingman Teemu Selänne - a father of four - will be 40 in July.
He has already come close to bringing down the curtain on his playing career, first after winning the Stanley Cup with Anaheim in 2007, and he has also once "retired" from the Finnish national squad in an emotional farewell game at the 2008 World Championships.
But lo and behold, Selänne will be playing for Team Finland at the Vancouver Olympics, which will get under way on Friday of this week.
A few weeks back, this international comeback seemed a little iffy, as Selänne fractured his jaw in a freak accident on the NHL ice, but it has healed sufficiently for him to put on a blue and white jersey again.
He already has a bronze (1998) and a silver medal (2006) from the Olympics, and would like nothing more than to complete the set.
The same goes for his strike partner, the 35-year-old center Saku Koivu, father of two and long-time captain of the Montreal Canadiens before he moved to Anaheim at the start of this season.
In September 2001, Koivu was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, but he gamely took on the cancer and beat it, returning to a hero's welcome from the Montreal fans in April 2002.
After that sort of kick in the gonads, not many would continue in their sport, but Koivu will be also in Vancouver looking for gold, along with 36-year-old father of three Jere Lehtinen (Dallas Stars, and the only Finnish player to have won both the Stanley Cup - in 1998-99 - and a World Championship gold medal, in 1995) and Ville Peltonen (Dynamo Minsk).
Peltonen will be 37 in May and has four children.
He first played for Finland in 1993, and has taken part in 18 of the 22 major tournaments that Finland has been involved in since then.
Finland has won 13 medals in those competitions - Peltonen has twelve of them in his cabinet.
Or consider the case of Jari Litmanen, a.k.a. "Litti", a.k.a. "The King".
Litmanen will be 40 in a fraction over a year from now.
He has enough money stored away from stints with Ajax, Barcelona, and Liverpool to live comfortably the rest of his days.
He has a beautiful wife, two young sons, and he enjoys almost God-like status in football-mad Holland, where he scored his greatest club triumphs.
In 1995, Litmanen was voted the third-best player in the world by the French footballing bible France Football - an accolade that comes close to overshadowing anything else in the history of Finnish sport.
But that was fifteen years ago. He has left behind the massive stadiums of Camp Nou and Anfield to play on the bumpy pitches of Rovaniemi, Oulu, and Kuopio in front of a couple of thousand spectators. This spring, Litmanen will again put on his boots for FC Lahti in the Finnish Veikkaus League, and it is by no means certain that his 130th appearance in a Finnish shirt (in January of this year) was his last.
With a new European Championships campaign on the horizon, Finland's head coach Stuart Baxter may be tempted to ask one more time for his services and for those of veteran defender Sami Hyypiä (36 years young and now doing the business for Bayer Leverkusen at the top of the German Bundesliga).
Basketball player Hannu Möttölä is still a youngster by the standards of some of those above.
He is only 33, but he quit the sport in 2008 after a successful career that took him to the NBA (Atlanta Hawks) and several big European clubs.
He packed it in because he was tired of playing and all the travelling that went with it - a new season, a new team, in a new country.
Möttölä had actually been looking forward to ending his career, to a time when he would be free to do all those things that professional sport had prevented over the years.
For six months he helped out as a labourer on the renovations to his house and played with his two young children.
"Panic is a pretty strong word to use, but I did feel a really powerful need to get back on court", says Möttölä.
"I mean I got real withdrawal symptoms when I'd spent five or six months not really doing anything. When you have played abroad for fifteen years or so and travelled around, it just doesn't work like that - that you can suddenly become a home-daddy, who plays on the floor with the kids for eight hours a day. All the energy inside you that builds up to bursting point. It was as though I had to get that taste of blood back into my mouth again."
When the renovation work was completed, Möttölä found he had that same spark for basketball that he had experienced ten years earlier.
"I've had experiences where a full house of thousands at home matches chant my name to the rafters or when 13,000 Turks boo my every move and throw stuff onto the court. I've always lived in front of big crowds in big arenas. You can't really explain it, but it's a bit like asking why it is that the Rolling Stones keep going out on tour..."
And now Möttölä is playing for Torpan Pojat in the Finnish League, in arenas where the spectators are often numbered in the hundreds rather than the thousands.
When the Helsinki club travels to Kauhajoki for an away match, they all pile into a cramped bus. The salaries in the local league are nothing to write home about.
"Yes, but it is those who have sacrificed most in the pursuit of something who are the last ones to let go."
Möttölä believes he still has several playing years ahead of him.
The end of his career will come when his body can no longer take the strain of a rigorous training regimen.
"The next time quitting the sport comes up, it will be for good. That's something that makes me think."
Professional boxer Amin Asikainen, now 34, won the European middleweight title in June 2006.
A year later he lost it on a technical knockout to the man he had beaten earlier, Sebastian Sylvester of Germany.
When the title subsequently became vacant again, Asikainen challenged for it, but was knocked out by Khoren Gevor in a bout in Helsinki in November 2008.
In September 2009 he was put on the canvas twice in the first round of another middleweight title bout against Matthew Macklin of the UK.
"It felt as though the ring was a completely alien place for me to be."
Nobody can continue a career in the fight game like that, but Asikainen issues the reminder that it is not possible to put an end to things in that way, either.
"After that last bout I went back to my hotel room and I burst out laughing about the whole thing. Was that it? Really? One decent left hook to the chin?"
Asikainen has sacrificed roughly 21 years of his life to boxing. There has not been much else in life, he admits.
"Of course it is a frightening prospect. I've looked at some alternatives. Already I've noticed that now that I'm training only once a day there's a bit of an empty sensation. I really should find something meaningful to do."
Asikainen does have some business interests in the pipeline. Together with another entrepreneur he imports sports equipment into Finland. He has also thought about opening a kiosk or even a café of sorts.
One thing still nags at his mind. In 2006 he was in great shape and he was offered a shot at the world middleweight title against the then holder Jermain Taylor of the United States.
The money wasn't right, and his manager turned down the fight.
"Now I'll never know what sort of chance I might have had."
These days he has tempered his dreams somewhat.
"I've been training five times a week for a month or so, picking up the vibe again. I thought I might look for a match of some kind in the spring. Then two or three test bouts, and perhaps a shot at a smaller title", Asikainen says.
Going on in the sport is a tough decision, since for a professional boxer it comes with a sizeable side-order of health risks.
Asikainen himself acknowledges the risks involved: "Something always happens in that little box upstairs when you get dumped on the canvas."
Professional sport is not just about risk; it is also a rather ascetic, cloistered way of life, in which personal decision-making is secondary.
And that minute-by-minute daily routine in the season tends to render the athlete like an inmate in a closed institution - wake up - train - eat - rest - train - get on the bus - warmup - perform - warmdown - rest.
It's like the army all over again.
Do what you are told, when you are told.
The Nordic Combined World Champion, World Cup winner, and Olympic team relay gold medallist Hannu Manninen called it quits in 2008.
He had himself a place lined up to study to become a commercial pilot, and he had just become a father.
The hard daily grind of staying at the top of his sport left him exhausted, and the motivation was slipping away.
Manninen, who will be 32 in April, says the decision to quit was an easy one.
"My last season was quite hard going. I was never really on song when it mattered. I was just tired out. It's an enervating life from one year to the next."
Manninen enjoyed his new-found freedom and did this and that - things he had not previously had time for: he got to know his new baby, sorted out the garden at home.
"There was a definite sense of relief."
It did not last very long, however.
In the autumn of 2009, Manninen announced he was making a comeback.
One reason was the fact that jobs as a commercial pilot were rarer than rocking-horse droppings in the nursery.
He was studying to become an unemployed flier.
But that was not the only cause for his change of heart.
"I don't know, I somehow missed the act of competing. I wanted to see if I could still hack it at the top of the sport. I'll take it one season at a time", he says.
The Olympics begin in a few days, and Manninen will be on the starting line, possibly driven by a desire to cap a career with the only thing he is really missing - an individual Olympic medal.
And that brings us neatly to the next comeback kid, ski-jumper Janne Ahonen.
Ahonen, a 32-year-old father of two, will be climbing the ski-jump tower in Vancouver.
He has won everything going in his sport, with the exception of an individual Olympic medal of any colour.
When he quit the hills in the spring of 2008, he was appointed as an unofficial consultant to the national squad on equipment matters.
His task was to teach the younger jumpers on the niceties of the jumping-suits, and how to get the most out of them.
Hardly any wonder, then, that he pretty soon announced he would be taking up his career where he left off.
And then there are those unfortunate cases who quit and never quite find themselves in the real world.
There are, sadly, plenty of Finnish examples to choose from - those individuals for whom the humdrum day-to-day of life without sport is altogether too much to deal with.
Matti Nykänen is a chapter all to himself.
We do not need to go here into the tragedy of Matti's life after he stopped being the world's best ski-jumper and became instead fodder for the tabloid headline-writers.
Cross-country skier Mika Myllylä has had a very restless time ever since he left the tracks, with alcohol problems and depression, and only a week ago it came out that last spring he had admitted to police (after years of lying and denying it) that he had taken the banned performance-enhancing drug EPO during his active career.
The former ice hockey stalwart Esa Tikkanen - winner of no fewer than five Stanley Cup titles with the Edmonton Oilers and New York Rangers - also had trouble with the demon drink, and rather than calling time on his career and settling down, he worked into his forties as an overweight player-coach with a club in the South Korean leagues.
Former footballer Atik Ismail, now 53, had several years as an alcoholic after he hung up his boots.
He says he became embittered when he had to give up his playing career at the age of 30.
It was tough to realise that his body was no longer responding with the speed it should, even before he'd reached his 30th birthday.
He has since cleaned up his act completely, but the bitterness does not go away. "It never will", he says.
What Ismail misses most is "the whole locker room thing".
In other words, those silly gags and pranks, the brotherhood of team-members, and at the same time the brutal pecking order and the fight for places in the starting XI.
It may be part of the reason why he is still in the game as a coach, now with a small club - Ilves from Jämsänkoski - playing in Finland's fourth division.
In the dressing room, he can recall the old days when he strutted his stuff out on the pitch in Finland, Belgium, Turkey and Sweden, when he scored the winner for HJK Helsinki in a 1982 European Cup tie against Liverpool, or the times when - in the thick of a match - he calmly stood on the ball, balanced there, and brought his hand up to give a cocky salute to the stands.
"I always had a quick look first to see where my dad was sitting in the grandstand. The game was always a celebration to me. It was the best moment of the week."
Perhaps hanging on to that moment is what keeps so many playing, and what inexorably draws them back when they think they've finally had enough.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 7.2.2009
When the veteran Tappara and Finland ice hockey center Janne Ojanen suits up in the locker-room this season, he is likely to be surrounded by a good many players who were not even born when he scored his first international goal at adult level, against the Soviet Union in March 1987.
One wonders a little at the pre-match banter between a bunch of 20-somethings and a man who will be 42 in April and whose oldest child is already well into her teens.
Does he ever think he might be too old for all this?
"Of course it's crossed my mind, yes. But to my surprise I've noticed that I can cope pretty well with the rigours of three games in four days. If push comes to shove and I can't hack it, then I'll quit."
It is not as if Ojanen will be falling out of hockey into thin air: he has a small firm producing business gifts in partnership with a friend.
He first considered hanging up his skates three or four years ago.
At the end of the 2008-2009 campaign it was "really touch and go", especially after a nagging thigh injury kept him out for the end of the season, but his wife Sanna, his three kids, and the Tampere Tappara fans talked him round.
Besides, he had something to play for: at the start of the new season Ojanen was just one point shy of the all-time record for goals and assists in the SM-Liiga, held by Arto Javanainen for the previous sixteen years.
"That was one reason. It would have left a bit of a bad taste in the mouth to quit just then."
After getting himself match-fit after a long layoff, he made his return to the ice in early November and after a nerve-jangling wait of a few "dry" games he finally scored the point that took him past Javanainen on November 28th.
Had he retired at the end of the previous season Ojanen says he would also have missed out on the unique rush that comes with seeing the puck hit the back of the opponents' net.
And on life in the Tappara locker-room, too, where apparently he still keeps his end up admirably well in the trash-talking among colleagues.
But now that the record is secure (at the time of writing Ojanen is nursing another thigh injury and teetering on the brink of yet another milestone with 799 points), is that it? Finito?
"Well, one more Finnish Championship title [he has three, all with Tappara] would be great to experience. But I really don't feel like saying anything either way about stopping", says Ojanen.
"I'll play this season through to the end and see how it feels. In principle it's possible I'll go on for another round."
There are plenty of others like Janne Ojanen: husbands and fathers nudging forty and still at the top of their sporting trade.
They drag themselves every day to the rink, climb up the ski-jumping tower, clamber into the boxing ring, onto the football pitch, or out onto the ski-tracks.
Morning training. A gritty workout with the weights in the gym. Speed work. Getting on the bus for away matches. Trips to training camps in the company of young lads in their twenties giving exaggerated organ recitals about their latest conquests.
What drives these old stagers to do it?
Football goalkeeper Antti Niemi is a father of two, and he will turn 38 in May.
He hung up his gloves in September 2008 after a bad wrist injury.
At the time he was playing for Fulham in the English Premiership after successful spells with Southampton and Hearts (and rumours that clubs of the stature of Arsenal and Manchester United were interested in securing his services), and after 67 caps as Finland's first-choice keeper before he withdrew from full international duties in 2005.
Then in August of last year Niemi announced he was returning to the game, and he was signed by Portsmouth on a one-year contract as backup to David James and to work with the club's goalkeeping coaches.
The Anaheim Ducks left wingman Teemu Selänne - a father of four - will be 40 in July.
He has already come close to bringing down the curtain on his playing career, first after winning the Stanley Cup with Anaheim in 2007, and he has also once "retired" from the Finnish national squad in an emotional farewell game at the 2008 World Championships.
But lo and behold, Selänne will be playing for Team Finland at the Vancouver Olympics, which will get under way on Friday of this week.
A few weeks back, this international comeback seemed a little iffy, as Selänne fractured his jaw in a freak accident on the NHL ice, but it has healed sufficiently for him to put on a blue and white jersey again.
He already has a bronze (1998) and a silver medal (2006) from the Olympics, and would like nothing more than to complete the set.
The same goes for his strike partner, the 35-year-old center Saku Koivu, father of two and long-time captain of the Montreal Canadiens before he moved to Anaheim at the start of this season.
In September 2001, Koivu was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, but he gamely took on the cancer and beat it, returning to a hero's welcome from the Montreal fans in April 2002.
After that sort of kick in the gonads, not many would continue in their sport, but Koivu will be also in Vancouver looking for gold, along with 36-year-old father of three Jere Lehtinen (Dallas Stars, and the only Finnish player to have won both the Stanley Cup - in 1998-99 - and a World Championship gold medal, in 1995) and Ville Peltonen (Dynamo Minsk).
Peltonen will be 37 in May and has four children.
He first played for Finland in 1993, and has taken part in 18 of the 22 major tournaments that Finland has been involved in since then.
Finland has won 13 medals in those competitions - Peltonen has twelve of them in his cabinet.
Or consider the case of Jari Litmanen, a.k.a. "Litti", a.k.a. "The King".
Litmanen will be 40 in a fraction over a year from now.
He has enough money stored away from stints with Ajax, Barcelona, and Liverpool to live comfortably the rest of his days.
He has a beautiful wife, two young sons, and he enjoys almost God-like status in football-mad Holland, where he scored his greatest club triumphs.
In 1995, Litmanen was voted the third-best player in the world by the French footballing bible France Football - an accolade that comes close to overshadowing anything else in the history of Finnish sport.
But that was fifteen years ago. He has left behind the massive stadiums of Camp Nou and Anfield to play on the bumpy pitches of Rovaniemi, Oulu, and Kuopio in front of a couple of thousand spectators. This spring, Litmanen will again put on his boots for FC Lahti in the Finnish Veikkaus League, and it is by no means certain that his 130th appearance in a Finnish shirt (in January of this year) was his last.
With a new European Championships campaign on the horizon, Finland's head coach Stuart Baxter may be tempted to ask one more time for his services and for those of veteran defender Sami Hyypiä (36 years young and now doing the business for Bayer Leverkusen at the top of the German Bundesliga).
Basketball player Hannu Möttölä is still a youngster by the standards of some of those above.
He is only 33, but he quit the sport in 2008 after a successful career that took him to the NBA (Atlanta Hawks) and several big European clubs.
He packed it in because he was tired of playing and all the travelling that went with it - a new season, a new team, in a new country.
Möttölä had actually been looking forward to ending his career, to a time when he would be free to do all those things that professional sport had prevented over the years.
For six months he helped out as a labourer on the renovations to his house and played with his two young children.
"Panic is a pretty strong word to use, but I did feel a really powerful need to get back on court", says Möttölä.
"I mean I got real withdrawal symptoms when I'd spent five or six months not really doing anything. When you have played abroad for fifteen years or so and travelled around, it just doesn't work like that - that you can suddenly become a home-daddy, who plays on the floor with the kids for eight hours a day. All the energy inside you that builds up to bursting point. It was as though I had to get that taste of blood back into my mouth again."
When the renovation work was completed, Möttölä found he had that same spark for basketball that he had experienced ten years earlier.
"I've had experiences where a full house of thousands at home matches chant my name to the rafters or when 13,000 Turks boo my every move and throw stuff onto the court. I've always lived in front of big crowds in big arenas. You can't really explain it, but it's a bit like asking why it is that the Rolling Stones keep going out on tour..."
And now Möttölä is playing for Torpan Pojat in the Finnish League, in arenas where the spectators are often numbered in the hundreds rather than the thousands.
When the Helsinki club travels to Kauhajoki for an away match, they all pile into a cramped bus. The salaries in the local league are nothing to write home about.
"Yes, but it is those who have sacrificed most in the pursuit of something who are the last ones to let go."
Möttölä believes he still has several playing years ahead of him.
The end of his career will come when his body can no longer take the strain of a rigorous training regimen.
"The next time quitting the sport comes up, it will be for good. That's something that makes me think."
Professional boxer Amin Asikainen, now 34, won the European middleweight title in June 2006.
A year later he lost it on a technical knockout to the man he had beaten earlier, Sebastian Sylvester of Germany.
When the title subsequently became vacant again, Asikainen challenged for it, but was knocked out by Khoren Gevor in a bout in Helsinki in November 2008.
In September 2009 he was put on the canvas twice in the first round of another middleweight title bout against Matthew Macklin of the UK.
"It felt as though the ring was a completely alien place for me to be."
Nobody can continue a career in the fight game like that, but Asikainen issues the reminder that it is not possible to put an end to things in that way, either.
"After that last bout I went back to my hotel room and I burst out laughing about the whole thing. Was that it? Really? One decent left hook to the chin?"
Asikainen has sacrificed roughly 21 years of his life to boxing. There has not been much else in life, he admits.
"Of course it is a frightening prospect. I've looked at some alternatives. Already I've noticed that now that I'm training only once a day there's a bit of an empty sensation. I really should find something meaningful to do."
Asikainen does have some business interests in the pipeline. Together with another entrepreneur he imports sports equipment into Finland. He has also thought about opening a kiosk or even a café of sorts.
One thing still nags at his mind. In 2006 he was in great shape and he was offered a shot at the world middleweight title against the then holder Jermain Taylor of the United States.
The money wasn't right, and his manager turned down the fight.
"Now I'll never know what sort of chance I might have had."
These days he has tempered his dreams somewhat.
"I've been training five times a week for a month or so, picking up the vibe again. I thought I might look for a match of some kind in the spring. Then two or three test bouts, and perhaps a shot at a smaller title", Asikainen says.
Going on in the sport is a tough decision, since for a professional boxer it comes with a sizeable side-order of health risks.
Asikainen himself acknowledges the risks involved: "Something always happens in that little box upstairs when you get dumped on the canvas."
Professional sport is not just about risk; it is also a rather ascetic, cloistered way of life, in which personal decision-making is secondary.
And that minute-by-minute daily routine in the season tends to render the athlete like an inmate in a closed institution - wake up - train - eat - rest - train - get on the bus - warmup - perform - warmdown - rest.
It's like the army all over again.
Do what you are told, when you are told.
The Nordic Combined World Champion, World Cup winner, and Olympic team relay gold medallist Hannu Manninen called it quits in 2008.
He had himself a place lined up to study to become a commercial pilot, and he had just become a father.
The hard daily grind of staying at the top of his sport left him exhausted, and the motivation was slipping away.
Manninen, who will be 32 in April, says the decision to quit was an easy one.
"My last season was quite hard going. I was never really on song when it mattered. I was just tired out. It's an enervating life from one year to the next."
Manninen enjoyed his new-found freedom and did this and that - things he had not previously had time for: he got to know his new baby, sorted out the garden at home.
"There was a definite sense of relief."
It did not last very long, however.
In the autumn of 2009, Manninen announced he was making a comeback.
One reason was the fact that jobs as a commercial pilot were rarer than rocking-horse droppings in the nursery.
He was studying to become an unemployed flier.
But that was not the only cause for his change of heart.
"I don't know, I somehow missed the act of competing. I wanted to see if I could still hack it at the top of the sport. I'll take it one season at a time", he says.
The Olympics begin in a few days, and Manninen will be on the starting line, possibly driven by a desire to cap a career with the only thing he is really missing - an individual Olympic medal.
And that brings us neatly to the next comeback kid, ski-jumper Janne Ahonen.
Ahonen, a 32-year-old father of two, will be climbing the ski-jump tower in Vancouver.
He has won everything going in his sport, with the exception of an individual Olympic medal of any colour.
When he quit the hills in the spring of 2008, he was appointed as an unofficial consultant to the national squad on equipment matters.
His task was to teach the younger jumpers on the niceties of the jumping-suits, and how to get the most out of them.
Hardly any wonder, then, that he pretty soon announced he would be taking up his career where he left off.
And then there are those unfortunate cases who quit and never quite find themselves in the real world.
There are, sadly, plenty of Finnish examples to choose from - those individuals for whom the humdrum day-to-day of life without sport is altogether too much to deal with.
Matti Nykänen is a chapter all to himself.
We do not need to go here into the tragedy of Matti's life after he stopped being the world's best ski-jumper and became instead fodder for the tabloid headline-writers.
Cross-country skier Mika Myllylä has had a very restless time ever since he left the tracks, with alcohol problems and depression, and only a week ago it came out that last spring he had admitted to police (after years of lying and denying it) that he had taken the banned performance-enhancing drug EPO during his active career.
The former ice hockey stalwart Esa Tikkanen - winner of no fewer than five Stanley Cup titles with the Edmonton Oilers and New York Rangers - also had trouble with the demon drink, and rather than calling time on his career and settling down, he worked into his forties as an overweight player-coach with a club in the South Korean leagues.
Former footballer Atik Ismail, now 53, had several years as an alcoholic after he hung up his boots.
He says he became embittered when he had to give up his playing career at the age of 30.
It was tough to realise that his body was no longer responding with the speed it should, even before he'd reached his 30th birthday.
He has since cleaned up his act completely, but the bitterness does not go away. "It never will", he says.
What Ismail misses most is "the whole locker room thing".
In other words, those silly gags and pranks, the brotherhood of team-members, and at the same time the brutal pecking order and the fight for places in the starting XI.
It may be part of the reason why he is still in the game as a coach, now with a small club - Ilves from Jämsänkoski - playing in Finland's fourth division.
In the dressing room, he can recall the old days when he strutted his stuff out on the pitch in Finland, Belgium, Turkey and Sweden, when he scored the winner for HJK Helsinki in a 1982 European Cup tie against Liverpool, or the times when - in the thick of a match - he calmly stood on the ball, balanced there, and brought his hand up to give a cocky salute to the stands.
"I always had a quick look first to see where my dad was sitting in the grandstand. The game was always a celebration to me. It was the best moment of the week."
Perhaps hanging on to that moment is what keeps so many playing, and what inexorably draws them back when they think they've finally had enough.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 7.2.2009
TOMMI NIEMINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
tommi.nieminen@hs.fi