In 2023, in Finland, you can speculate on the selection of a baseball player as Athlete of the Year without getting a treatment guidance order, writes Pekka Holopainen.
Pekka Holopainen Sports journalist
Switzerland’s sports year 2019 was not fabulous, but it could not be classified as bad either.
Alpine skier Beat Feuz won the overall competition of the Skydiving World Cup. The Emperor of Cuckoo Clock Country Roger Federer narrowly missed out on a win in the Grand Slam of tennis, but became the first man since Jimmy Connors 100th in number one ATP tournaments and increased his number of wins to 103 during the year. Prize medals were awarded in several competitive sports, such as swimming, cycling and athletics.
The athlete of the year was chosen Christian Stucki34. The German word Schwingen directly means swinging or swinging, but in Switzerland it means above all a form of wrestling loved by the country’s German speakers, which is hardly known outside of Switzerland.
Stucki is even a living legend of Schwingen, considered the national sport of Switzerland, and the first representative of his sport to be crowned Athlete of the Year during the then 59-year selection tradition.
Donkey bridge to Finland
From this starting point, it would not even be necessary to build a very rickety donkey bridge from Switzerland to Finland, where the competition season of our own, very popular national sport ended over the weekend in terms of the main series.
In the 76-year history of the selection, the Sportsman of the Year title has never been awarded to a sport.
But the other weekend, baseball fans who were excited about Sotkamo Jymy’s championship and especially the performances of a middle-aged man, asked on social media if Jymy’s home run joker, who played brilliantly in the final series, could Roope Korhonen42, to be Sportsman of the Year.
The first 13 Superpesis championship baseball player is now the all-time hitting king, the completed regular season hitting king and the best player in the East-West game.
In the 2021–2022 season, Vimpelin Vedo forged the championship Jukka-Pekka Vainionpää finished 35th in the Sportsman of the Year voting, as well as the World Cup gold winner for the Lions with an overtime goal Sakari Manninen. A year earlier, champion Mansen’s forward ace Tuomas Jussila was awarded 37th place.
Reflection is essential
However, the most important thing is not how high Roope Korhonen ranks in the vote.
The essential thing is that the smart people who follow sports broadly and with an open eye, in general, think about whether an athlete who has given his testimony at the Finnish Chamber could be worthy of such a choice.
It tells more about how baseball is doing in Finland. The average viewership of the men’s main series was 1381 in the season that ended, and 661 for the women’s.
The popularity of the latter is in a class of its own in women’s team sports, of which the hot final series between Pori Pesäkarhuje and Manse PP is a parade example.
In week 37, ‘s nest broadcasts took the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 8th places in TV2’s most watched in Finnpanel’s follow-up survey. The historic tennis Davis Cup broadcast dived into the mix to 6th place.
The streaming service Ruutu, which televises all Superpesis and football Veikkausliiga matches, does not disclose its viewership numbers publicly, but even there the national game beats the king’s game by a score of 6–0.
In the internationalized world of sports, this kind of impassive phenomenon should not be possible. Or would it be possible precisely because of that, as a kind of antithesis of globalization?
The best Finnish goal scorer in the Veikkausliiga has scored seven times this season. Above him in the statistics, there are a lot of foreign players, whose names will soon be replaced by new ones and new ones without being remembered by the general public in any way.
This is not possible in baseball. We are at the same campfire year after year, where Janne Mäkelä hit and Mikko Kanala that. In these turbulent times, there is enough attraction around such a white.
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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