Kati Kivimäki survived the corona pandemic as the manager of Pohjola’s largest shopping center. The hockey league’s men’s rope exhausted him to the point of quitting in less than a year, writes journalist Pekka Holopainen.
Pekka Holopainen Sports journalist
When skier size Siiri Rantanen The 98-year long earthly life ended on May 5, the afterwords did not quite know how to emphasize enough what kind of totem pole in Lahti took its last breaths before its deserved eternal rest.
Rantanen was never afraid to admit that in the Finnish sports reality of the 1950s and 1960s, he was the “squeamish battery” who didn’t accept anything. Like the fact that the women of the national team got one pair of skis per season, the men sold equipment intended for women under their own names and there was no lubrication help of any kind, even creams.
Thanks to unyielding sportswomen like Siiri Rantanen, we reached a situation where, for example, in the years 2008–2012, only women were chosen as Sportsperson of the Year and not, for example Wilma Murto is not at all an impossible choice for the current year.
In the Finnish individual sports field, a large part of the brightest stars have been women as a rule for a long time.
Two days before his death, May 3, Siiri Rantanen no longer followed the news stream. There he would have been able to read that the first female CEO of the ice hockey league, the SM League, Kati Kivimäki the historic race that started last June was more than 97 years shorter than the life of the skiing legend.
The league’s communications guru Tuomas Nyholmin the text of the resignation notice he wrote was broken Samu Haberin pop lyricism, as one would expect from the biographer of Sunrise Avenue’s golden cucumber.
However, either unintentionally, intentionally or even Freudian, there was one revealing sentence left in the release. It proves that Rantanen’s life’s work was left unfinished, at least as far as Finland’s national sport is concerned, despite the fierce attempt: “I firmly believe in the work that we started together, but at the same time I feel that it is better for the CEO of the League to come from a deeper background in the sport.”
That is, in Finnish: in it, the female CEO admits that a woman should not have been chosen for the job and that she made a big error in judgment when she accepted the job.
Kivimäki will be bundled up from the point of view of equality of the mental state of the SM league.
In one of his ingenious sentences, Kivimäki also summarizes the mental state of the SM league from the point of view of equality. The umbrella organization Jääkieksliito’s status has been defined in the media for quite some time now.
About the details of the events Neither Kivimäki nor the other parties to the termination paper have spoken publicly.
There are logical reasons for that. Even if you would really like to open up in the media, almost no one wants to pay the price of a German top SUV as a contractual penalty.
However, the situation is well illustrated by the fact that Kivimäki lasted for three years as the manager of the largest shopping center in Pohjola, the Pasila Mall of Tripla. Two of them were cut short by the severe stranglehold of the corona pandemic.
The behavior of the managing director of a couple of league clubs has reportedly been part of that famous last straw.
He lasted less than a year in his new job. The attitude towards the female CEO has certainly been a big disappointment. The behavior of the CEOs of a couple of league clubs has reportedly been at least a big part of that famous last straw.
Before Kivimäki started his job, he said in an interview with Urheilu that he has not encountered belittling or glass ceilings in his working life. It is hardly surprising what activity he was involved in when he finally came across them.
But not so bad, not even something good. The three most lucrative medal sports in Finland’s Olympic history have been athletics, Nordic skiing and wrestling. The Wrestling Association and the Sports Association elected their first president in 1932, the Ski Association in 1931.
Right in the spring of 2023, this handsome organizational history got Riga Pakarinen in the form of its first female president.
Pekka Holopainen
The author is a columnist based in Pori and the only sports reporter who has been selected as Journalist of the Year in Finland.
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