Markku Kukkoaho’s decades of media silence remains. Even the unsolicited help of contemporary athletes didn’t help, writes Pekka Holopainen.
Pekka Holopainen
18:00•Updated 18:35
The EC athletics championships will be shown on channels from 7th to 12th. June.
“In Poland, when it was 35 degrees below zero, he jumped long into the snow project, threw the puck at dusk and made bets on the icy road. I couldn’t even dream of anything better, there were no indoor halls nearby.”
The text above is from one of Finland’s all-time athletics writers Matti Hannus from the pen, printed in three parts of the Urheilu 2000 book series, and it tells about one of the most mythical figures in the country’s extensive sports history: Markku from Kukkoaho76.
When Simo Lipsanen 2017 broke Pertti Poussin triple jump Finnish recordKukkoaho became the holder of the oldest SE in athletics and has not had to give up the title.
The sixth place in the track round came with a time of 45.49 in the Munich Olympic final in 1972.
There is enough to remember
Due to the European Championships in Rome starting this week, there are plenty of memories of the previous European Championships in the Eternal City, 50 years ago. For Finns, ten medals are enough to remember.
Rome also culminated in the big picture a fifty-year period in which Finnish men Markku Kukkoahon in the lead, they reached the top of the world in a track tour and, on the scale of the old continent, to the top.
The second oldest Finnish record in athletics can be found in the 4×400 meter relay on September 10, 1972; it is three days younger than Kukkoaho’s personal SE.
The time of 3:01.12, which brought the sixth place, would have been enough for the finals in, for example, the World Championships in 2013, 2017, 2019 and 2022, which says the essential.
The track dynasty was in many ways at least as fascinating a phenomenon of the 1970s as the golden continuum of endurance running.
In addition to the Olympic bids, Kukkoaho was fourth in the EC finals twice, Ossi Karttunen once Fifth and in Rome 1974 the long relay bronze medal came off.
It was no coincidence that at the same time the entire Finnish family of sports flourished, because track cycling in particular is a kind of pole sport in multi-level athletics, whose well-being or ill-health can be seen everywhere.
Hard currency in the USA
In American universities, quality quarter-milers are hard currency: the best of them can help their team in every sprint and relay, the most durable part in the 800 meters and the fenced circuit.
The level of Finnish men’s track laps from the past decades is known, but now, for example, by a great emeritus coach Antti Mero thanks to the senior, there is light from the tunnel.
However, the journey is long: the European Championships in Rome 2024 will be held without a Finnish male quarter miler, even though the finest product of the Meron Academy Viljami Kaasalainen The record level from the early 45s is approaching.
The police officer Markku Kukkoaho, who represented Oulu Pyrintö, set the standards for posterity: the average of his top ten runs was 45.69, which is six hundredths harder than the record of the country’s all-time second man.
46 seconds was broken 16 times – the others have not been able to do the same. The Munich Olympic anchor section slipped in 44.4 seconds.
One of the crowd gone
This week, the games of half a century ago are remembered on Urheiluink’s media surfaces through the mouths of several Menestyjä from the time, but one is missing from the crowd: Markku Kukkoaho.
I take it upon myself to say that the matter has not been caught due to the lack of company. In this profession, the interviewees sometimes have to persuade and talk too much, but with Kukkoaho I set my personal records completely new.
After half a decade of trying, the same had to be said for the great hero of the Montreal Olympics Alberto Juantorena In the semi-finals of Munich 1972: the blonde policeman goes to the final, the fat Cuban to the choir.
Not even the unsolicited help of contemporary athletes helped; Kukkoaho was adamant.
He certainly left a spark of hope; maybe the legendary silencer of Oulunsalo will end his decades of media silence one day.