He mentioned Paavo Nurmi, the legendary runner from Turku, who a hundred years ago took five medals from under the Eiffel Tower and became the biggest star of the Olympics.
In other words: it gave birth to the first modern sports superstar, who was admired even by US President Calvin Coolidge.
Every era has its great runners, in antiquity it was the Greeks, today it is the Africans, and between the wars Finland was a world running power.
“Flying Finns”, as they were called at the time, collected precious metals at world championships, Olympics, and all kinds of meetings.
The biggest of them was called Paavo Nurmi…
Finnish has the word sisu, but it does not have a simple Slovak translation. It describes spirit, an inner strength that includes willpower, determination, courage and perseverance.
It is a quality that Nurmi embodied and also had to, because few would believe that the boy who was born into a poor Finnish family on June 13, 1897, would one day grow up to be a big, rich and respected man.
“What is it about this phlegmatic Finn that makes him better than any other sportsman who has ever donned spiked shoes?” asked The Guardian in 1925.
“He is petite, fair-haired, sometimes moody and always lively. He has beautiful thighs and nicely rounded calves, but nothing to suggest that he is the superhuman that the stopwatches make him out to be.’
Was it perhaps because he drank sour milk as a child? Or because he lived in poverty from his earliest childhood, almost exclusively on raw fish and rye bread? Perhaps he was also helped by the fact that he went to school long kilometers on foot in the summer and on skis in the winter.
We still don’t know the exact answer, but there was definitely a lot more to it.
He started racing as a boy and was not bad at running. Unfortunately, his father died when he was thirteen, he had to leave school and start earning. He got a job as a delivery boy in a bakery, pulling carts and bags around his native Turku, later he worked in a foundry.
However, he did not give up running, he trained while working, his role model was Hannes Kohlemainen – the first of the flying Finns, who won three gold medals at the 1912 Olympics.
He signed up for the Turun Urheiluliitto sports club, in whose colors he won his first three thousand meter race. He trained alone and in the team he was always considered the loudmouth.
Antwerp 1918 was already a huge success, for all only one incident mentioned by foreign sources.
It was Saturday and with it came the 10,000 meter run. It was so hot outside that only half a dozen of the 42 competitors reached the finish line.
For a long time, ambulances collected those who did not arrive from the track…
One Frenchman is said to have reached the stadium, but in the last lap he lost his orientation and started practically spinning on the spot. He suddenly snapped out of his trance and started off again at great speed, but he was so disoriented that he sprinted to the stands and fell unconscious there.
SpongeBob Nurmi Paavo Nurmi with the Olympic torch in Helsinki 1952.
Conversely, Nurmi, running his sixth race in five days, finished a minute and a half ahead of his nearest rival. No problem. The next day, he again dominated the three thousand meter race, setting a new Olympic record. Again, apparently without much effort.
But that was Antwerp, four years later in Paris, Nurmi surpassed himself.
Nurmi even trained in three phases from April to September in 1924. He took a ten-kilometer walk interspersed with sprints in the morning, a five-kilometer jog during the day, and another seven kilometers in the evening. He especially liked cross-country runs and difficult tracks.
He studied, read, the literature of the time, which was devoted to medium and long distances, he had in his little finger.
The methods he used to lengthen his stride included running on the tracks behind the train – holding on to the bumper. After all, his long stride made his running look elegant and lively at first glance, but it was said to be very deceiving and stressful for the person running behind him.
“Before, during and after the race, he paid no attention to his opponents. He never spoke and never smiled. The man’s sheer inhumanity broke the hearts of those who had to compete against him,” he once wrote in a profile article in The Guardian.
That is also why he went to the Olympics in Paris in 1924 as a clear favorite. He had six races planned – 1,500 m, 5,000 m, 10,000 m, cross country, team cross country and team 3000 m. However, the expedition management had other plans and did not deploy it within 10 km.
Paavo won an incredible five gold medals in 4 days. He even ran 1,500 and 5,000 meters within one hour – 1,500 meters in a world record of 3:53:6 and five kilometers in 14:31.2, a new Olympic record.
“But in today’s times it would no longer be possible,” commented Merčiak on Nurmi’s unprecedented achievements.
Paavo Nurmi, who was twenty-seven in 1924, entered the ranks of legends. He received his gold coins from July 10 to 13. On the cinder track of the stadium in Colombes.
It was extremely hot in Paris at that time, forty degrees, maybe that’s why the officials didn’t want to use him on the ten-kilometer track. Paavo, however, was not paying attention, and allegedly ran one that day in a time under 29:58.
But someone else won the race, it was Finn Ville Ritola in the official world record of 30:23. At home, only three months after the Olympics, Nurmi took the record back – a time of 30:06.
Nurmi won an impressive eight Olympic gold medals. He was the holder of many world records. Perhaps his fame could not be greater. After all his successes, he accepted an invitation to the United States, where he was scheduled to race 55 races of various lengths.
The Americans put their best runners against him, but they were only able to beat him twice. Paavo added 39 world records to that.
He was not only the darling of Finland, he was also loved by all of America. He became a role model for many American boys.
He was able to use his success and fame. Add to that his determination and willingness to learn new things, and soon he was as successful a businessman as he was an athlete. In a few years, he became one of the richest Finns.
In Helsinki, he opened a store with men’s clothing and accessories, which became a sought-after attraction. Emil Zátopek also shopped here during his participation in the Olympics – but he was not so much interested in clothes as in a personal meeting with a great legend.
With their self-centeredness and insatiable desire to win, great athletes are often demanding people. This description fits Nurmi exactly. He was shy, reticent and unsociable, but as his career progressed, his confidence grew.
The self-willed, mistrustful and capricious champion is said to have often tested the patience of sports managers and others. Communication with him was extremely difficult, Nurmi’s favorite “Well, it’s as I say” often killed the other’s appetite for conversation.
However, when he was in a good mood and among a small group of acquaintances, he turned into a pleasant companion, the image of a taciturn man directed mainly at the public. His repertoire did not include flamboyant displays of emotion, he perceived the media with a considerable degree of aversion, he called the writings of journalists inflated things.
In his private life, he was excessively frugal and kept to a strict schedule in which even ten minutes’ deviation from the norm was unacceptably long. He was never interested in politics, but in terms of his outlook on life, he ended up being a capitalist and a patriot.
He admired America, where everyone is the master of his own destiny, and also declared that “it is better to be poor in the West than free in the East.”
Nurmi reportedly had almost no close friends, and with his figure, he also had a hard time with women. In 1932, he caused a sensation when he married a social beauty from the Turkish business environment. After three years, however, his vivacious, tolerant wife had had enough of married life.
Even their only child, son Matti, had a difficult childhood under the strict rule of his father. In the 1950s, Matti Nurmi was a national-level middle distance runner. He achieved good results despite his father, not because of him.
What about Paavo? His boy was said not to have enough talent to succeed as a runner.
“When Matti was born, Paavo measured his feet and said he wasn’t happy,” his wife said after their separation. “He wanted the boy to become a runner, but I was strongly against it. Paavo even tried to arrange the boy’s diet so that Matti had a strong leg for athletics.’
However, the result was only that father and son were never close to each other…
Later, health problems entered his life. Heart and brain embolisms gradually worsened his condition. The bitter experience of losing control over one’s body and relying on the help of others also affected a man like Nurmi.
On his 75th birthday, he gave an exceptionally rare interview. “World fame and reputation are worth less than rotten cranberries,” he said in it.
“It was also manifested by psychological changes, he broke out into fits of rage because sports did not guarantee him good health.
“The irony was that Edvin Wide – his great Swedish rival who was in his shadow all his life – lived to be a hundred and died in 1996 after enjoying an active life until almost the last day,” Finnish author Veli wrote about Nurmi’s end of life – Matti Autio.
The famous runner died on October 2, 1973. But his last held record outlived him by twenty-three years, and was broken only in 1996.
Source: sportweb.pravda.sk
