Biathlon World Championships will be held in Nove Mesto from 7th to 18th. February. shows the races on its channels and follows the races in this article. See ‘s shipping information at this link.
The 1972 Sapporo Olympic Games had gone poorly in Finland. After the closing ceremony, it was stated that the gold medal balance showed a round zero for the first time during the time that Finland had participated in the Olympic Games.
However, two days before the finals, on February 11, one somewhat surprising medal was achieved, which really spawned great things in the next half decade.
Finland’s team Esko Sick–Juhani Suutarinen–Heikki Ikola–Mauri Röppänen took silver in the 4×7.5 kilometer biathlon relay, where the great hero of the team was 24-year-old Ikola. With his part, the young executive officer brought Finland to a medal feeling before the anchor part.
The selection of the team was preceded by quite a bit of confusion, because the head coach Eino Närva had already announced the composition of the relay quartet during the stopover in Stockholm. It was exhausting Yrjö Salpakari.
After that, Salpakari finished 5th in the only individual competition at the time in Sapporo, i.e. 20 kilometers, literally a couple of millimeters away from victory.
“Then you won’t spoil this!”
– I wasn’t allowed to ski a personal trip. With our tour guide Erkki in Hautamäki of course, there were passions to talk to the Salpakari message group and leave me on the beach. When it didn’t work, he shouted almost in my face that “then you’re not going to screw this up”, Heikki Ikola, 76, recalls with a laugh at his home in Jurva, which is now part of Kurikka.
Sako’s 6.16 caliber rifle, which did a guaranteed job at the Sapporo shooting range, is stored with the competition sticker. The gun would still be perfectly suitable for hunting chickens, but Ikola only goes to the deer forest.
– It’s in good condition, but it hasn’t been fired for a long time.
In 1972, message silver was very important. Biathlon was already once, Kalevi Huuskonen 1961, elected Athlete of the Year in Finland, but the success of Sapporo raised the appreciation and interest of the still new sport in Finland to new spheres.
– It was based on the fact that the Sapporo Games went completely under the bench and, for example, the men’s skiers did not get a medal at all. We were such a nice spark of light, since then no less than three times (1975, 1977, 1981) Ikola, who was chosen as the athlete of the year, says.
Lex Shoemaker 1974
His long-time South Karelian teammate Juhani Suutarine, now 80, became an athlete in 1974, because of which the rules of the Sportsman of the Year voting were changed. Exactly half a century ago, the World Cup was held in Minsk, the capital of Belarus in the Soviet Union, in dry and freezing cold weather.
The frontiersman, who spends his retirement days in Hoivakoti, won both the 20 kilometers and the 10 kilometers, which came as a new sport to the competition program. It is the only time that Finland has achieved two individual gold medals in one prestigious competition. Disappointment was great in the Soviet Union, above all, because he was not considered the best biathlete in the world, later politically active Alexander Tikhonov achieved no personal medal at all.
Ikola, who skied fast in the Games, but suffered from weapon problems, was catching up Heikki FlöjtinSuutarisen and Simo Halonen with message silver.
At the end of the year, Suutarinen collected more than 50 percent of the first places in the vote of the Sports Journalists’ Association, but the 400-meter European champion and ME woman was chosen as the Athlete of the Year Riitta Salin.
The association decided, on the initiative of its South Karelia branch, to change its rules so that since then, whoever has collected more than half of the first places has automatically been the Athlete of the Year. This route was awarded to an F1 pilot, among others Angel Rosberg 1982.
Kneissles work
Ikola remembers the Minsk Games like it was yesterday. Just before them, the World Skiing Championships had been contested in Falun, where a breakthrough in a new innovation, i.e. fiberglass, was seen at the time. Puusuksi-Suomi did not travel in Taalainmaa on the sled of development, which cost To Juha Miedo gold medal in the 30 km distance. Biathlon had time to react to Falun’s bitter experiences.
– Jussi (Suutarinen) was a Järvinen team skier, which would have meant that he would have had to compete on wooden skis in Minsk. But he himself contacted Kneissl import in Jyväskylä and got new fiberglass from there to take with him to the Games.
The Austrian brand had just wiped the table with wooden skis in Falun; Among other things, the Swede who beat Miedo worked with Kneissl Thomas Magnusson. Norwegian Magne Myrmo was the last winner of the wooden ski competition, with 15 kilometers.
– Jussi was in excellent shape and shot excellently in the games, but it was equally important that he played the skiing game correctly and reacted intelligently to the situation at the turning point of his development. His skis worked like a dream in Minsk, Ikola praises.
In the spring of 1974, he got a new barrel for his rifle at the Minsk Games.
– It won three World Championship golds and two Olympic silvers.
In 1975, in Anterselva, Ikola took the first of his three World Championship gold medals at the 20 kilometers in Anterselva. Above all, the games are remembered for the fact that Finland took the only relay victory in biathlon history, anchored by Ikola. The only change from a year ago was that now the team had Heikki Flöjt’s brother instead Henrik Flöjt.
The team’s level at that time is illustrated by the fact that 20 km bronze medalist Esko Saira did not make it to the relay quartet.
Two Olympic medals
The Innsbruck Olympic Games 1976 are the only ones where Finland has won two medals. Gold escaped from Hopea-Ikola at the last 20 km shooting location due to a sensitive trigger mechanism. The message silver routinely came after the Soviet Union.
In 1977, the executive officer of the Pori Brigade won the 20 kilometer gold and anchored Finland Erkki Antilan, Raimo Seppänen and after Simo Halonen for relay silver.
It was time to celebrate the balance of the five-year period that ended: a total of five gold, five silver and one bronze in the World Cup and Olympic Games. An absolutely amazing balance when you consider that two individual distances were skied for the first time at the World Championships in 1974 and at the Olympic Games in 1980 – and women were not yet involved in the sport.
In 1972–77, no less than nine different athletes were crowned with the medal. After the Sapporo Olympic Games, Röppäse, who turned his attention to range shooting, was to become a medalist in the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics as well. The bronze medal in the miniature rifle 3×40 shooting match was just one point away on the Mytitshi course.
That’s where the magic word came in: miniature rifle. At its conference in 1976, the International Biathlon Union decided to switch to a light and small-caliber rifle for the 1977-1978 season, lowering the starting threshold for the sport and increasing its international distribution. Today, the sport, which is a top sports and TV product, says that the decision was smart.
During the rifle era, the countries that dominated the sport were mainly the Soviet Union, Finland, East Germany, West Germany, Norway and Sweden, and occasionally Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania. Today, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, international competition is clearly wider.
– Yes, that decision made possible such a great thing as women’s biathlon, which is a big explanation for the fact that the sport is doing so well internationally. The road would have been rockier with a five-kilogram rifle, Ikola states.
Finland still achieved World Championship relay silver in 1978 and 1979 (it is the most recent relay medal), and in Lahti in 1981, Ikola made history by grabbing the 20 kilometer World Championship gold with a miniature rifle on his back. He was accompanied by Erkki Antila with two personal medals.
Among the athletes from the sport’s golden period, the Flöjt brothers and Antila are deceased.
The severity of the change at that time is illustrated by the fact that Ikola is the only biathlete who has won a personal prize competition with both a rifle and a submachine gun on his back.
Since then, top success has been achieved by men Tapio Piipponen, Harri Eloranta, Ville Räikkönen, Paavo Puurunen and Vesa Hietalahti. About women Kaisa Mäkäräinen naturally had its own chapter.
Piipponen, who won bronze at the World Championships in 1985, half-humorously stated that his time in the national team was a bit of an orphan at times as the only civilian in the group. Now, according to Ikola, we are at the heart of the matter:
– When you look at the team of the 1970s, it consisted of three professional groups: operational officers (now university officers), border guards and sea guards. If such a word as clandestine professionalism is allowed, then that was what it was all about, says Ikola, who also worked as a head coach at the turn of the 1980s and 90s.
When the legend, who owns a huge collection of awards, presents, for example, the SC gold medals of the Executive Officers’ Association, he laughs that there were also the absolute best in the world, his own service brothers.
– In the same way, the level was absolutely world-class when the defense forces measured the border and sea guards. In other words, internal competition was the main explanation for the fact that Finland was so successful internationally at that time. There were also several strong sports centers such as South Ostrobothnia, Hämeenlinna, Säkylä-Punkalaidun, Suomussalmi and other Kainuu and Imatra. There were a lot of enthusiasts who were given the opportunity to develop and compete by the employer, recalls Ikola, who represented Punkalaitumen Kunto at the top.
Ikola often trained with military caliber, i.e. 7.62 cartridges, for which you didn’t have to pay a penny to the “house”.
He says that in order to get to the World Championship, he had to clear the level test competitions first. There was even a relay competition between Jurva and the rest of the world, which became a great success with the audience.
– Now you only register for the World Championship, but still the number of starters is a fraction of what it was in the 1970s. In other words, we have seen such a very unruly development that while the sport has grown significantly internationally by all measures, this has not really happened in Finland.
According to Ikola, you don’t have to look far for the reason. The state’s personnel policy no longer makes it possible for the defense forces or border control to have a significant number of de facto professional athletes whose contribution the employer would benefit from mainly outside the competition season.
For example, the defense forces of fixed-term sports non-commissioned officers only Tuomas Harjula is a biathlete.
– My own employment contract enabled 12 hours of weekly training during working hours. It must be remembered that support activities such as maintenance and training also came from the army or the border. The biathlon association’s responsibility was much smaller than it is now.
In comparison countries, for example Germany, Italy, France, Austria or the Czech Republic, practically all biathletes at representative level are on the payroll of the army, border control, police or customs.
The Finnish athlete who is most interesting to Ikola at the World Cup in Nove Mesto is a youngster who recently excelled at the World Cup in Anterselva Otto Invenius.
– You can see from everything that he has substance. This may sound like a bold prediction, but the body of the men’s national team is so good that even a relay medal is not at all impossible in the near future.