When the historic moment of celebration in Finnish top sports turns even years old, the women’s javelin throw in the pit does not even fit into the program of the main domestic event, writes Pekka Holopainen.
Pekka Holopainen Sports journalist
broadcasts Paavo Nurmi’s track and field competitions on Tuesday at Areena at 4:35 p.m., on TV2 at 6:00 p.m. and on radio Puhee at 4:30 p.m.
On Monday, the inauguration of the Helsinki Olympic Stadium turned 85 years old. When the most memorable events of the arena that has seen it all are ranked, one always and always fits at the top: Tiina Lilla too secured in the last round the javelin world championship at the first World Championships in athletics in 1983.
The historic home event and the massive national importance of athletics at the time threw the 22-year-old athlete into a hot pressure cooker. Lillak sat Keke Rosberg’s and Matti Nykänen next to the top of the nation’s cabinet and hit the counter with a season whose toll has not been seen in Finnish athletics since then and is unlikely to be seen again.
The last of its kind?
In Lilla, the World Championship gold was Finland’s first, but later six other Finnish track and field athletes have been able to do the same. Instead, on June 13, 1983 – 40 years ago to the day – Lillak did a trick in Tampere’s Ratina, which is quite likely to be the last of its kind in Finnish athletics.
The man from Espoo, who briefly held the world record in 1982, threw 74.76, took the ME back to Greece from Sofia Sakorafa with a margin of 56 cents and was allowed to keep its status for about two years. After that, the world record went to an East German For Petra Felke-Maierwhose throw of exactly 80 meters was finally the last record quotation of the old spear model dug at the turn of the millennium.
With that model, Lillak is the third all-time statistician. The fact that the average of the best eight results before the World Cup was amazing: 72.88 shows his stamina as a home team.
The athlete, who recognized himself as sensitive and vulnerable, went for a massage on Saturday, August 12, after qualifying, and on his way back, he hit the scene of a traffic accident that claimed two lives. The fact that the night was spent in sweaty sheets because of a bloody nightmare tells about the hardness of the final victory the following night.
ME man for a while
Eight years after the WC in Lilla, it seemed that Finland had returned to the WC of men’s javelin, when Seppo Räty broke the world record no less than twice. The joy was short-lived, because the International Association of Athletics Federations, or the then IAAF, considered the structure of the javelin model in question to be against the rules and left the records unratified.
The times in 1983 were of course very different in athletics from many points of view than now, but over the years Lilla’s world record has taken its rightful place in the hall of honor of Finnish track and field sports. Only a quarter miler in addition to him Riitta Salin has made the Finnish women a European Championship result, in the European Championship final in Rome in 1974.
The ME result of a Finn was last permanently recorded in the statistics on September 14, 1972, when Lasse Viren broke the 5000m world record at the Olympic Stadium.
Possible for whom?
If we think about who could, with some kind of realism, break the valid ME in the view of their career, there are only women in the line-up and not too many. Wilma Murto has jumped from the pole to within 21 long centimeters of the world record. Silja Kosonen chasing moukari’s ME from about 9.5 meters, but his potential has probably been seen very little.
After the career of Lillak, who started a wild boom in the sport, Finland has achieved five prestigious medals in the women’s javelin thanks to three athletes. However, it is a very sad symbolism that when Finland’s last, or at least the previous, ME result in athletics celebrates a draw, the program planners of the country’s number one event, the Paavo Nurmi Games, did not even consider including the women’s javelin throw in the evening.
The species group has been in a deep hole for years. There are plenty of controversial views on the history of the situation, but the numbers don’t lie. In the 2020s, one new athlete has joined the 60 meter club. All crossings of 64 meters in the modern javelin have already been seen at the beginning of the millennium, by three women.
Of course, Lillak was a super talent of his kind, whose raw wood no Finnish coach has been able to refine since then. A woman who shunned pounding training typically trained for about one and a half hours a day with high intensity.
However, the situation is even macabre in itself, that one of Finland’s leading women of the 21st century – Paula Tarvainen, Mikaela Ingberg and Taina Kolkka fish (now Ojaniemi) – one or even two would have been a record level medalist in six value competitions in the previous ten years.
Reflecting the history of the sport, women’s javelin medals have been on sale at a discount, but Finland has and is looking at this gift horse.