Paavo Nurmi Part 1: Stopwatches and Sisu
A century ago, Paavo Nurmi won five gold medals at the 1924 Paris Olympics. Now, for the first time since they left, those medals will return to the French capital ahead of this year’s games.
Those victories in Paris remain the most athletics golds ever won at a single Olympics and mark the zenith of Nurmi’s career – a career during which he won 12 Olympic medals and set 58 world records. But for such an acclaimed athlete, The Flying Finn, as he came to be known, remained a reclusive complex of contradictions.
He loved to win but was always disinterested in his achievements. He studied the science of running but never shared his knowledge. He had no specialty, excelling at everything from 800m to the marathon, and was never beaten at cross country, 10,000m, or on the roads. He also had no defining tactics: he simply ran at an even pace until he found himself in the lead, paying more attention to the stopwatch in his hand than to his competitors. Such was his combination of dominance and indifference that one newspaper dubbed him "a mechanical Frankenstein created to annihilate time."
Nurmi was born into a working-class family and raised in financial hardship. Following his father’s death, he left school to work as an errand boy for a local baker, and his family rented out their kitchen to earn extra money. Nurmi left home when he was conscripted in 1919 and quickly impressed in athletic competitions. Inspired by the performance of his countryman Hannes Kolehmainen at the 1912 Olympics, he began to experiment with training methods in his spare time. These included running behind trains holding onto the rear bumper to stretch his stride and sprinting in iron-clad army boots to strengthen his legs. His unit commander, Hugo Österman, was an athletics fan and recognised Nurmi’s potential. As the year progressed, he essentially allowed Nurmi to train full-time: by the 1920 Antwerp Olympics, The Flying Finn was ready to make his international debut.
To perhaps everyone except himself, the 1920 games were a success for Nurmi. He won silver in the 5,000m – the only time he would lose to a non-Finnish runner at the Olympics – and gold in the 10,000m, the individual cross-country, and the relay event.
Upon returning home, Nurmi continued to establish himself as a runner. Over the following years, he set world records in everything from the 1500m to the 10,000m – a feat never repeated before or since. His countrymen viewed him as the physical embodiment of “sisu,” a Finnish concept that denotes determination and resilience, and he quickly gained notoriety at a time when Finland was establishing itself as a newly independent nation.
This meant that, come the 1924 Olympics, Nurmi arrived in the French capital shouldering high expectations.
Paavo Nurmi crosses the line at the 1924 Paris Olympics
His Paris campaign opened in a rather strange way. He was furious that, despite being the reigning Olympic champion, the selectors had decided not to allow him to compete in the 10,000m in favour of resting him ahead of a busy schedule later in the week. They instead nominated Ville Ritola, who won the race and broke the world record in a time of 30:23. While that was happening, Nurmi took to the warmup track with a reporter and a timekeeper to prove the selectors wrong, running 29:58 in a solo effort to unofficially become the first person to break the 30-minute barrier.
His first legitimate races came a few days later, in what many predicted would be a scheduling nightmare for Nurmi: he was due to run the 1500m and 5000m finals within two hours of each other. A few weeks prior, he had scheduled a test event to gauge how feasible this would be. He broke both of his own world records over the distances in the same hour and promptly informed the selectors that he would be racing the events at the Olympics. Indeed, The Flying Finn faced no problems in either race, picking up his first two titles of the games.
A couple of days later, Nurmi added two more gold medals to his tally – this time in the individual and team cross country events. He crossed the line almost two minutes clear of his closest competitor in a race so shocking that it was permanently dropped from the Olympic schedule. While the 40-degree Celsius heatwave, noxious fumes emitted by a nearby power plant, and knee-high thistles marking most of the course did little to trouble the Finn, the same cannot be said for his rivals. Of the 42 starters, only a dozen finished: of those finishers, eight were taken away on stretchers. The Red Cross and local police went out to search for those who hadn’t made it back to the stadium, most of whom had to be “picked up unconscious all along the course.”
Paavo Nurmi leads the 1924 Olympic Cross Country final
But Nurmi was unfazed. He returned to the stadium the following day for the team 3000m, capping off his Olympic campaign with an unprecedented fifth gold medal. After the closing ceremony, The Guardian concluded that he had “reduced the 1924 Olympic Games to a farce, a series of exhibition races.”
In the years that followed, The Flying Finn became increasingly famous. Despite his efforts to shy away from the limelight, the world seemed determined to watch as he travelled across Europe and the USA, breaking records and winning titles at will. World Athletics president Sebastian Coe explains that he was “as famous as the Hollywood stars of his day, lauded by US presidents…[he] was the first truly global sports star.”
However, Nurmi’s performance at the 1924 Olympics - five gold medals in just six days - was truly his watershed moment. It is difficult to understate the cultural and historical significance of these medals within the world of athletics, and their centennial return to Paris is an exciting prospect for many.
You can read more about the upcoming exhibit here.
Paavo Nurmi’s five gold medals from the 1924 Paris Olympics