Planica World Cup skiing on channels 22.2.–5.3.2023. See the program and broadcast information of the World Ski Championships at this link.
The Finnish team, which is preparing for the World Cup in Planica, has achieved ten podium places in the World Cup this season.
That’s two more than a year ago before the Beijing Olympics. Cross-country skiers from those competitions Ivo and Kerttu Niskanen mixed Krista Pärmäkoski brought a total of six medals.
Beijing’s medal tally was rare. In the last 20 years, the Finnish team has returned from Nordic skiing competitions with several medals only in 2007 and 2009. Finnish athletes achieved eight medals from both World Championships.
When you look at the number of prize places in the World Cup, Finland’s starting point in the World Cup in Planica, which will start soon, is even better than Beijing. So is it worth waiting for the rain of medals again?
Medals with what?
Urheilu studied Finnish winter athletes’ competition results since 2003. The results show that the medal hauls in recent years have been huge when compared to the results of the World Cup.
For example, before the 2007 World Cup in Sapporo, the Finns had achieved 35 prize places in that World Cup season. 30 of them came from individual competitions and were written by no less than nine different athletes.
Of these nine athletes Virpi Kuitunen (now Sarasvuo), Hannu Manninen and Anssi Koivuranta realized their success at the World Cup into personal value competition medals.
Only Harri Olli left Sapporo as an individual medalist who was not among the top three in the World Cup before the World Cup trip. Matti Heikkinen did a similar upgrade in Liberec two years later.
Otherwise, every Finn who has won an individual World Cup medal has been on the podium at least once before the honors.
The level narrowed significantly
The Finnish cross-country skiers Kerttu and Iivo Niskanen, Pärmäkoski and Johanna Matintalo as well as the combined multi-year number one stick Ilkka Herola.
Of them, only Kerttu Niskanen and Pärmäkoski have been in the top three more than once. The change in the starting level is significant compared to the first decade of the 21st century.
For example, before the 2009 World Championships, nine Finns had been on the podium more than once. The Finnish team that traveled to the World Cup in 2005 had achieved no less than 20 competition victories in the season’s World Cup.
In the first decade of the 21st century, the Finns came to the World Cup on the wings of a convincing World Cup success. The number of prize places before the World Championships varied between 22 and 51.
Since 2011, the Finnish team has arrived at the World Cup only once in a situation where it has had more than ten World Cup podium finishes. This happened in 2017, when the team’s balance was 15 podiums before the World Championships in Lahti.
The reduced success of the Finns in the World Cup has also been reflected in the World Cup medals: from the games of 2013, 2015 and 2019, the result was only one bronze.
So far, the Finnish team has been able to avoid a race of zero medals, but will it be able to do that for much longer at the current pace?
What is realism?
Even at the beginning of the 2000s, Finnish athletes were successful in all three competitive forms of Nordic skiing. At the beginning of the last decade, ski jumping fell out of medal consideration with a rush, and also combined squatting for several years.
Sports expert Petter Kukkonen was the head coach of the combined Finnish men’s national team from 2012 to 2022 and witnessed with his own eyes the biggest challenges of ski jumping and combined: small number of enthusiasts and turnover.
In Kukkonen’s first head coaching season, the Finn who collected the most World Cup points was 17-year-old Ilkka Herola.
Since then, Herola has been a very strong score shark except for one season, 2017–2018, when Kukkonen’s personal protégé appeared as the top man Eero Hirvonen. Behind the duo, there has been occasional success in the youth World Championships, but it has not turned into top results at the adult level.
2021 World Cup silver medalist Herola also carries the biggest Finnish expectations on her shoulders in Planica, if we are not talking about cross-country skiing.
However, the Finnish bench athlete should remain realistic.
– If you are on the podium once in 16 races, it is quite unlikely that you will succeed in the hardest place. The probability is small, but there are possibilities if everything works out, says Kukkonen, referring to the balance of Herola’s World Cup season.
In cross-country skiing, the absence of Russia means a significant relief, especially in the pursuit of relay medals, but the results of the World Cup competitions that preceded the World Cup trip did not play into Finns’ pockets in advance speculation.
In the Beijing Olympics, the Finnish team managed to create the best country in the middle of the corona pressure. When the team also received from maintenance the winning ski for most of the games, the end result was a catch of six medals.
A corresponding competitive advantage can lead to several medal coffees in Planica, but without it the result can even approach zero.
– The result can be 1–2 medals or 6–7. The starting point is not insanely delicious when you look at the previous World Cup results, Kukkonen says and underlines:
– Basically, athletes perform at their own average level in value competitions, especially when high altitude or strange snow conditions are not messing up the palette.
In recent years, Finland’s success has depended on the few and the chosen few. Iivo and Kerttu Niskanen and Krista Pärmäkoski are Finns’ biggest medal hopes in cross-country skiing for the tenth year already.
The results of the World Cup are of course only one measure that should not be read like the damn Bible. However, as far as the gold medalists of the prestigious competitions are concerned, the podium finishers of the World Cup have given a very accurate picture of what is to come in all competition formats.
Since 2010, only two cross-country skiers, Hans Christer Holund and Johan Olsson, has been able to push to the highest podium of the World Cup from outside the podiums of the World Cup. No one has succeeded in men’s ski jumping and the combined event, and only in women’s ski jumping Maren Lundby.